The past year has once again illustrated the key role automation plays in sustaining the global supply chain. Brands of all types continued implementing innovative material handling technologies to address rising ecommerce volume with less labor resources, and to ensure their products quickly reach consumers’ homes as-ordered.
Here’s a countdown of our top 5 automation trends and applications as detailed by our Automation Insights blog over the past year:
5. Subscription Boxes
Who wants a missing ingredient in a cookie box order or a meal kit? And what about a missing piece of evidence in a Crime Box subscription? That could ruin the entire experience the service hopes to create. A warehouse execution system (WES) balances the flow of work to eliminate bottlenecks, manages automation for order finishing and personalization, and improves accuracy for boxes with multiple items.
4. Goods-to-Person
When labor is difficult to find, GTP enhances employee productivity by allowing them to focus on picking or other value-added tasks while automation handles basic product movement. Goods-to-person systems are scalable to meet growing demand or SKU count. Automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are two popular technologies used to execute GTP processes.
3. Manufacturing
Pick-to-light systems have helped distribution centers boost order fulfillment speed and accuracy for decades. Now, production facilities are adopting light-directed applications as a great visual tool for error-proofing processes. Our blog and video demonstration show how Matthews Lightning Pick can be easily configured to continuously improve quality for parts picking, kitting, assembly, sequencing, and other manufacturing tasks.
2. 3PLs
Capacity LLC is an engineering-driven, third-party logistics provider (3PL) that partners with Matthews for reliable and flexible material handling technologies. See our video showing how light-directed batch picking carts and put walls, plus WES-managed labeling and shipping sorter applications, provide a flexible, integrated, and end-to-end solution that can meet rapid increases in ecommerce and omnichannel order volume.
1. E-Grocery
The pandemic introduced many consumers to ordering groceries and meal kits online, and the convenience has kept them ordering more. Our application brief shares how a global e-grocery brand managed to rapidly scale for massive subscription and custom order growth, using Matthews’ solutions for order building and picking, order finishing, shipping, and replenishment in multiple distribution centers throughout the United States.
Keep reading Automation Insights next year to see the latest innovations in warehouse automation, or contact Matthews to talk about your application.
