Automation Increases Productivity

Initial investigation of Industrial Robots or Automatically guided Vehicles (AGV) bought forward one exciting finding, the Chinese market for robots was growing at an incredible rate, so I thought, why would a country with 1.4 billion people want to supplement labour with robots. The answer a shortage of labour and a desire to improve productivity.

If we look at the New Zealand situation, we find a labour market that is struggling to meet the demands of industry from traditional sources such as:

• Immigration,

• Youth from other countries enjoying an overseas working holiday,

• Temporary labour bought to fill gaps

These sources have suffered from the impact of COVID-19. There is also a growing political environment that does not see these sources of labour as a long-term solution.

Every day we hear of another industry struggling to find labour, the temporary overseas staff are not here. The backpackers have gone home. Moreover, there is a hint that immigrant labour could be discouraged in the future as it could use it to keep wages down.

Robots can replace hard to find labour and boost productivity.

Traditionally order fulfilment was a labour-intensive operation involving a person pulling a hand cart or similar around a store selecting goods required to fill the order, manually matching the printed order to the stock numbers in the store. An increase in orders leads to an increase in staff.

This system has often adapted to meet small but growing e-commerce needs in the current environment. E-commerce bought its requirements magnified by COVID-19 and consumers raced to find on-line sources. One client's orders increased from an average of 50 per day and peaked at more than 1000 in a single day, which completely swamped the system and eventually led the client to cease on-line orders.

How can robots assist?

The situation described above requires a man and a cart to pick the order. Depending on the size of the warehouse, they may do 20 order line per hour. So to do 60 order lines would require three pickers and one packer.

The use of AGVs in a similar system could employ 3 AGV or automatically Guided Vehicles. And one packer. The AGVs, as the name suggests, can use cameras or radar to find the storage unit that has the item and bring it to the packer who selects the number required, and the AGV returns the storage unit to the store.

Doubling the manual system to handle 120 order lines per hour would require another three pickers and one packer.

An AGV system could double its output by adding another shift with one packer and utilizing the existing AGV's.

AGV's can reduce dependency on labour and improve productivity.

An integrated system can also provide other benefits from automating a distribution system.

For more information call me John Biggs, 021 763 522

John Biggs. has spent the last 20 years selling and installing ERP systems. Logistics robots are a logical extension to provide improved efficiency and accuracy. For more information www.hikrobot.co.nz.Or email john.biggs@hikrobot.co.nz, LinkedIn