siliconindia | | November 20198CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN WAREHOUSE AUTOMATIONBy Sushil Rathi, COO, Mahindra LogisticsMLL provides integrated third party supply chain and people transport solutions to companies across a diverse cross section of industries. The firm creates integrated solutions which maximise service levels with the minimum logistical cost.T hriving E-Commerce and retail sector worldwide is driving adoption of technology. The effective use of robots, high speed sorters, wearable devices or smart glasses for faster pick-ups is the trending topics in logistics sector. Hence, warehouse automation is in buzz these days and sterling topic everyone wants to explore as a demonstration of their technological and process capabilities. Though, there is a particular dilemma in India. It is important to evaluate trade-off carefully between using human workforce and machine. Though the cost of automation may not vary much between nations such as Japan and India but the pay-back period of 2-3 years in Japan, becomes 8-10 years in India due to the availability and cost of labour.This was a deterrent in deploying au-tomation in Indian warehouse. Howev-er, the increasing service level demand of e-commerce/retail with extremely skewed operational requirements, has paved the way for Indian companies to go for automation. Basic Automation: It is crucial to identify a problem to find out automation requirement in any setup.You need to find out repetitive tasks that consume large amount of time or those that commonly lead to errors. Once you find those points in the process, you can start to think about automating them.Secondly, there is a need to understand the importance of automation. The basic in my opinionSushil Rathi, COO
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