The Benefits of Optimizing Your Warehouse Space
Running a warehouse has never been more demanding. With labor shortages, rising real estate costs, and customers expecting faster fulfillment than ever, the pressure on logistics operations continues to mount. Fortunately, optimizing your warehouse space can address many of these challenges head-on, and the potential benefits are much bigger than many businesses realize.
Faster Order Picking
Optimizing your warehouse space can offer significant improvements in order picking and throughput. For example, the average pick-rate for a warehouse employee is typically between 60 and 80 items per hour. However, warehouses that are optimized through layout improvements and deploying automation technologies, such as automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS), can achieve many times this rate, delivering substantial gains in throughput and efficiency.
Improvements in Employee Retention, Safety, and Wellbeing
Efficiently organized warehouse layouts enable employees to move through their tasks without unnecessary steps, reducing the amount of physical wear and tear, and repetitive injuries. There are also strong benefits to mental health, as well-organized layouts with logical placements mean that employees don’t have to think so much about where to go or what comes next, cutting down on mental strain and fatigue.
Systems such as pick-to-light technology, goods-to-person solutions, and automated sortation all have huge benefits in this respect, taking pressure off the team and improving accuracy. Instead of constantly switching tasks, employee workloads become smooth and predictable, leading to fewer mistakes, less stress, and more energy at the end of the day.
Automation technology also delivers significant safety benefits. Solutions such as ASRS reduce the amount of heavy-lifting employees are required to do, minimizing the risk of injury.
Having happy and healthy employees is more important than ever, as 37% of transportation and logistics businesses have reported major labor shortages. Happier and well-supported employees tend to stick around longer, keeping expertise in-house and reducing the costs of recruitment and training. Optimizing your warehouse is a smart move, boosting workforce retention at a time when labor is increasingly hard to find.
Lower Utility Costs
If you operate a cold-storage facility, increasing the density of your storage can radically reduce the amount you spend on cooling. As a global Autostore integrator, at Kardex we have seen how ultra-high density storage hugely cuts down your storage, meaning you can minimize the area of your warehouse that you’re cooling, resulting in significant energy savings.
As robots don’t need lighting to operate, you can also considerably reduce your energy consumption simply by switching off the lights, delivering more cost-savings and optimizing how your warehouse operates. Additionally, AutoStore is so energy-efficient that 10 robots use the same amount of power as one standard vacuum cleaner.
Scalability without Facility Expansion
Warehouse optimization and automation allows you to free up significant amounts of space in your existing warehouse, meaning that you don’t have to move to a larger facility or expand your existing one to grow your business. This is especially beneficial if you operate in a costly real estate area, where moving to a larger facility can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Optimizing the footprint of your operations and increasing storage density could also mean you’re able to manage your current operations in a smaller, cheaper facility, saving costs and improving margins. With ASRS like AutoStore, new storage, robots, and ports can be added as you expand without disrupting your existing operations.
Increased Inventory Accuracy
Optimizing workflows through the introduction of picking technology can provide huge improvements to error rates and returns. Automated systems that guide workers through the picking process can cut the risk of human error and, in some cases, enhance picking accuracy by more than 99%.
These enhancements provide major benefits for processing speed and customer satisfaction, streamlining your operation and boosting your profitability. Automated systems and advanced WMS track all your inventory to ensure you know where all items in stock are in real-time, can retrieve them quickly, and effectively balance stock with demand.
The Cumulative Effect of Warehouse Optimization
Optimizing your warehouse through automation and layout improvements can provide significant benefits to your business. The cumulative effect of warehouse optimization extends far beyond any single metric: greater efficiency, happier teams, lower costs, and room to grow all work in tandem to streamline your operations, improve your profit margins, and increase customer satisfaction.
About the Author
Royden Edwards is a warehouse automation professional with nearly 20 years of experience spanning both operations and systems integration. He spent nearly 10 years on the customer side, leading the day-to-day operation of automated warehouses, while also driving the strategic growth of automation within the business.
For the past 11 years, he has worked as an AutoStore™ systems integrator, primarily focused on lifecycle success and helping customers maximize system performance, reliability, and long-term value.
Having experienced automation from both the operator and integrator perspectives, Edwards brings a practical, customer-focused view to the challenges and opportunities surrounding warehouse automation.