Keeping up with the growing e-commerce world is no longer a luxury; it's a survival tactic for businesses that want to maintain their relevance for long. As of 2024, the ecommerce sector had reached unexpected levels of about $6.3 trillion and was projected to keep increasing. Consumers have also evolved in how they consume products - more now expecting near-instantaneous fulfillment. And competition has not stopped soaring, with more warehouses becoming customer-centric. How, then, can you ensure you fit in?
The answer to ensuring you are relevant amidst these changes is technology. However, finding a suitable technological solution can be quite complicated and might, at times, necessitate a tech advisor. In other cases, you might find it expensive to implement these technologies. Despite all these challenges, modernising your warehouse to align with contemporary tastes and preferences can really pay off.
Improve Operations
Humans can sometimes make errors, and this can be quite costly. However, by using technology to automate, enterprises can reduce errors and increase accuracy and productivity, saving costs and efficiently meeting customers' varying demands. For instance, a warehouse inventory management system allows you to monitor your stock levels in real-time, enabling you to be in sync with fluctuating market demands.
More and more warehouses are turning to automation, with the market expected to grow to $26.9 billion in 2024 alone. To modernise your warehouse, you don't have to complicate it – just start with simple changes that can help you enhance individual productivity and basic business operations. You might want to begin by answering simple questions like how fast you need to fulfill orders and the stock-keeping units you need to stock and control. Good-to-person systems that use robotics can help reduce lead times and improve order fulfillment.
Keep Employees Happy
You can't afford to turn a blind eye to the state of your employees if you want to be successful in any business. One of the ways you can improve their psyche is by offering them wearables that help reduce daily frustrations – such technologies can increase operational efficiencies by up to 10%. If, for example, your employees are facing challenges where legacy barcode readers are slow, consider replacing them with rugged mobile scanners that can read even poorly printed or damaged barcodes.
Plus, you want to always ensure your employees perform exceptionally well. Corporate performance management software helps to evaluate how workers are performing against set standards and manage their progress in relation to company goals. This can help managers exact meaningful insights that can help make their teams more functional.
Increasing Workplace Safety and Efficiency
Advancements like wearable technology have emerged to help businesses enhance the safety of their workplaces. Especially now that about 20,000 workers are affected by forklift accidents each year, the importance of warehouse safety cannot be overemphasised. Plus, a UK study revealed that more than 75% of non-fatal injuries could cause employees to miss work for more than seven days. Wearable technology can, therefore, help alert employees if they are in danger and thus reduce the possibility of accidents.
Imagine the time you can save if your workers can easily scan the shipment and assign it to the correct areas. That's one of the benefits that wearable technology offers – the complexity of tasks is reduced, and workers can complete multiple tasks at once. Actually, with this technology, SMB warehouses can take up to 24% more orders daily without increasing labour expenditures. In a 10-hour shift, if you use wearable ring scanners, you can save up to 30 minutes.
North Central Sight Services is an example of an enterprise that has implemented this technology to improve inventory and picking efficiency. By turning to Zebra mobile devices, they increased inventory counts by about 83%. For companies seeking to enhance their onboarding processes, wearables can be a great way to get started – they reduce training time by about 90%.
Optimising your layout and Organisation
Modern warehouses always aim to reduce the distance employees have to travel to handle items. Smart storage solutions like mezzanine floors can help you effectively maximise vertical space while integrating virtual reality could save time by about 22% and reduce errors by 33%. On top of that, technologies like IoT sensors can monitor environmental conditions, allowing managers to decide whether or not to move sensitive inventory affected by temperature variations to more stable environments.
Warehouse drones come in handy when you want to optimise movements – of goods, machines and workers – within the warehouse. This way, you can identify bottlenecks and congested areas that affect operational efficiency. In the event of emergencies like leaks, drones will provide real-time situational awareness, thus promoting facility safety. And for the effective performance of the drones, you should always consider factors like flight time and manoeuvrability before assimilating this technology into your layout.
As you can see, the modern customer has become more discerning, especially when it comes to deliveries. Gone are the days when people would keep waiting for ages before they could receive their orders - consumers now want near-instantaneous fulfillment. And, for warehouses that modernise their experiences, there is a great chance of standing out in this competitive market.
