Retailers across the Southeast Asian region are under tremendous supply chain pressure due to increased demand for online orders, hyper-competitive pricing and faster delivery times. For online orders, customers want the cheapest price, shortest delivery time, up-to-date information on stock availability, access to the real-time status of their orders, and seamless return options. On top of all this, businesses continue to contend with increasing labour costs, high staff turnover, increasing costs for building space, pressures from increased regulation and safety requirements, and supply chain disruptions, be they from pandemics, natural disasters and geopolitical tensions.
All these factors combined have made the task of cost-effective order fulfilment more challenging than ever before. However, there is a way business can tackle these challenges and turn them into an opportunity to improve competitiveness. As this new age of retail and eCommerce coerces supply chains to work faster and harder, automation and technology in Fulfilment Centres are proving to play a critical role in helping businesses streamline their processes towards achieving higher levels of efficiency in their distribution operations.
So, what can retailers do to meet demand in an e-commerce age when the only constant appears to be disruption?
Optimised processes make for streamlined operations
The answer to succeeding in the future involves adopting a strategy to optimise operations around cost-effectively meeting and exceed consumer expectations. Optimisation falls into three broad categories: processes, human efficiency, and inventory management.
Processes provide the structure for supply chains to function. Automation and technology help optimise processes by removing non-value-adding activities, improving productivity, reducing errors and increasing the speed of the necessary tasks. As an example, the order fulfilment processes can be improved significantly in terms of speed, productivity and accuracy with the implementation of wearable devices to provide real-time instructions and interaction with operators. The process of order tracking is automatically improved with the same software that drives the technology, also providing the capability to track every transaction and movement of inventory through the order fulfilment task.
Inventory management is key
Inventory storage has transitioned from being a static requirement to a dynamic one, with many supply chains now able to drive high levels of optimisation across their logistics operations and their retail operations as well. Automation and technology often play a key role in achieving these high levels of optimisation.
Manual forklift trucks and Automated Storage Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) are no longer the only material-handling technologies that can be used to store inventory. Technologies such as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), mobile robotics and shuttle systems can provide much more flexible, scalable and dynamic storage solutions in a wider range of supply chain facilities.
Make your workers more effective
In traditional order fulfilment operations, operator travel consumes the largest portion of an operator’s time in fulfilling a customer order. One of the most effective ways to improve the efficiency of operators is to minimise operator travel, or to eliminate it altogether. In terms of automation, Goods-to-Person (GTP) picking solutions can increase operator productivity by over 5 times by eliminating operator travel. Advances in robotic fulfilment technology have enabled order fulfilment processes to be performed without the involvement of operators at all in some cases.
Case Study: RedMart’s Advanced Online Grocery Fulfilment with GTP
To meet surging demand and growth in online orders, RedMart – the online grocery service of e-commerce giant, Lazada – implemented automation at its logistics facility in Singapore, in order to improve productivity, speed, accuracy, and space efficiency.
A key part of the automation solution is the Goods-to-Person (GTP) order fulfilment, powered by a Dematic Multishuttle system. At the ergonomically designed workstations, operators pick orders up to five times faster than they were previously when they would have to manually travel through multiple aisles of shelving to pick the items required for an order.
The GTP system covers a huge product range in a small footprint, with an extremely effective picking method. Workers stay in one place as items are automatically delivered to their workstation, increasing picking speeds, improving fulfilment accuracy, and advancing operator comfort and safety.
Optimisation with information
With the use of new logistics automation and technologies, retailers have a pathway to improve their fulfilment operations, achieving cost-effective and efficient fulfilment processes, higher levels of inventory availability, shorter lead times and improved traceability. Robust and real-time integration between mechatronics, control systems and software platforms across fulfilment operations and their broader supply chain networks, is a key ingredient to achieving competitiveness and sustainable success in the future landscape of retail.
For more information on how your business can optimise its supply chain operations and meet market demands, please visit: www.dematic.com/en-au
Written by: Michael Bradshaw, Senior Regional Director Sales & Solution Development, Dematic Asia