As far as Ecommerce Industry is on the rise and giants like Amazon, Flipkart are battling to capture most of the Indian market share, the warehousing sector transformation curve will continue to move in upward direction. This emerging trend will also benefit manufacturing and supply chain industry in terms of new business opportunities. Recently, a market study suggested that the Indian warehouse automation market will reach USD 512.2 million by 2026, compare to USD 86.2 million in 2020.
Being an early bird, many companies have already adopted automation solutions for the warehouses. Smooth and safer flow of goods for various warehouse operations is being taken care of by robotics and other dynamic solutions available in the market.
Population of online buyers in India is expected to reach 220 million by 2025 with the increase in demand of faster or same day product delivery across many cities. Keeping this in mind, e-commerce companies have to establish warehousing facilities in multiple cities and implement an automated workflow in those facilities to fulfil customer requirements on time.
Talking about future of warehouse automation in India, some big brands are planning to invest billions of dollars in the warehousing and industrial parks in India. These big brands are expected to choose automation in order to get higher returns on their investments.
Exponential growth of manufacturing, retail, and FMCG Industries in India can be looked as one of the important factors of increase in demand for warehouse automation.
Key Market Trends
Lack of skilled labour, high labour cost, inaccurate inventory management, delivery delays, seasonal order spikes etc., made the stakeholders to discontinue traditional systems and adopt robotics-enabled automation systems for warehouses. Finding and selecting the efficient, cost-effective and ready-to-deploy automation solution for the business is the difficult task.
Many types of warehouse solutions such as Autonomous Case-handling Robots (ACRs), Conveyors, Sortation Systems, Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS), Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), etc. have already taken the market space for addressing many warehousing operational pain points.
According to the reports, ACRs offers a high-performance and affordable solution compared to other warehouse robotic technologies. ACRs are hybrid and fast-moving vehicles having a shuttle-type retrieval function for handling totes from static shelving.
In warehouse operations, the picking processes contributes as much as 55% of the total operational expense. To reduce operational cost and to increase warehouse efficiency, companies should focus on optimizing these processes before it’s too late.
ACRs are powered by intelligent WMS that delivers picking accuracy up to 99.9%, compared to manual picking. Working on advanced algorithms patterns, ACRs can achieve efficiency of 3-4 times (per worker) higher than manual labour. This allows operators to work on other important warehouse tasks, rather than spending time in locating the right totes. The robots can easily bring only the required totes to fulfil multiple orders.
ACRs enable storage heights of up to 4.5m, providing more space for more items. Comparable to other robot technologies that offer storage heights of <2m.
ACRs can be deployed within a week and can go live within one month (depending on the project size). Different warehouse automation solutions such as AS/RS take over one month to deploy and almost one year for commissioning.
One significant advantage of ACR systems is that they can be easily move to another location and offer an easy-to-adapt solution applicable to new types of goods.
Competitive Landscape
There are substantial growth opportunities in the warehouse automation within e-commerce, retailing, and 3PL logistics. Warehouse automation is a growing trend in India and it’s becoming the best way to gain competitive advantage in the complex warehouse business scenario.
Early investment in the right warehouse automation solution will prove a smart decision in near future.
Khursheed Alam is the co-founder of Atmos Systems