The word "intelligence" is everywhere these days. From smart home to smart manufacturing, our work and life can not be separated from "smart" for a moment. The same goes for warehouses. In the era of Industry 4.0, intelligent warehousing has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and has become a hot spot in the development of the warehousing industry. At the same time, a variety of unmanned vehicles, drones, robots and other unmanned storage technology into the eyes of enterprises. Let many enterprises have a misunderstanding: intelligent storage is unmanned storage.
So we first need to properly understand what smart warehousing is.
Intelligent warehousing is a warehousing management concept, is through information technology, the Internet of things, cloud computing and mechatronics to achieve intelligent logistics, so as to reduce warehouse warehousing costs, improve operational efficiency, enhance warehousing management capabilities. The purpose of its application is to ensure the speed and accuracy of data input in all aspects of warehouse management, ensure that enterprises can timely and accurately grasp the real data of inventory, and reasonably maintain and control warehouse inventory.
On the other hand, the surface of the understanding of unmanned storage is no one's storage, it sets automatic three-dimensional shelves, roadway stackers, lifting equipment, automatic access to transport equipment, automatic sorting system equipment, indoor trucks, robots and other equipment in one, forming a certain perception ability, self-reasoning judgment ability and automatic operation ability of the intelligent system.
It can be seen that the focus of intelligent warehousing is on the word "intelligent", which is not equivalent to unmanned warehousing, which is only a small part of the collection of the former.
Why switch from traditional storage to smart storage?
With the continuous development of e-commerce, there are many problems in traditional warehousing logistics, such as:
1. The traditional warehousing industry is based on the collection of warehousing management fees as a business mode, so enterprises hope that their warehouses will always be full. This approach is different from the main thrust of logistics.
2. Traditional logistics warehouse covers a large area, and it takes a long time to build a warehouse. Not all companies can afford to spend as much money as big companies to build their own warehouses
3. Lack of management personnel: It is difficult to find experienced professional warehouse management personnel, especially in this emergency situation, the establishment of storage treatment is even more difficult.
4. Imperfect professional system: All standard warehouses have their own WMS system, which can change the order information at any time. It takes a few years to build this system before you can find a system that fully meets your storage needs.
In a sense, the warehousing process is as dominant as ever in the logistics process. It can be seen from the development history of logistics that the study of logistics started from the "bullwhip effect", that is, in the process of multi-link circulation, because each link will have faults in the speculation of demand, with the increase of circulation links, the faults will be infinitely amplified, and the inventory will be more and more contrary to the needs of practice, which will lead to the increase of storage costs and market risks.
Therefore, from traditional storage to intelligent storage is imminent!
Then the point is, how to transform?
Having said so much, I believe everyone understands the importance of intelligent warehousing for the development of today's society, but here comes the point. How to transform? According to Bockel, the following three issues need to be addressed:
1. In the short term, the cost of traditional storage is definitely lower than that of intelligent storage
The cost of traditional storage is mainly reflected in several aspects, such as warehouse construction costs, rent or depreciation, depreciation of storage equipment, labor costs, material consumption, electricity and so on. According to the national economic census data, the average annual profit rate of the domestic warehousing industry is only 2.6%, if a comprehensive intelligent transformation of the warehouse, the cost will be high in the short term, especially the introduction of warehouse automation equipment, equipment upgrades, management system transformation, etc., will make the cost of intelligent warehousing higher than traditional warehousing. This makes many companies consider short-term input-output more inclined to the upgrading of traditional warehousing, rather than directly using smart warehousing. For example, adjust the internal and external layout of the warehouse to make the market value more reasonable and optimize the spatial structure; For example, adjust the sorting and stacking of goods to improve operational efficiency; Appropriate application of barcode technology such as RFID.
2.the traditional storage of talent requirements are not high
Through the use of intelligent storage, the establishment of advanced systems to achieve standardized warehousing, although there are traditional warehousing incomparable advantages, but to achieve this upgrade, the decisive role is still talent. Domestic warehousing and distribution centers are mostly ordinary warehousing companies in third - and fourth-tier cities. Employees are generally older and less educated, and there is not a full pool of storage professionals to match the smart iot. How to attract more high-quality, professional young talents to join the warehousing industry is also an important problem that the intelligent warehousing industry needs to solve.
3. The technical risks inherent in intelligent warehousing have not been effectively addressed
For example, the network signal transmission is unstable or vulnerable to malicious attacks, and the industry pain points such as information collection errors caused by intelligent sensing equipment failures have not been effectively solved. This is a big problem that requires hardware and software vendors to work together to solve.
With the increasing impact of multiple factors such as consumption upgrading, rising labor costs, and increasing demand for operational efficiency, traditional warehousing must turn to intelligence. However, the transformation is not to blindly transplant advanced ideas, regardless of the comprehensive utilization of costs, but to build on the basis of balancing their own economic interests. Hardware and software vendors also need to address technical risks as soon as possible from their own business. Bockel believes that in the near future, China's warehousing industry will embark on a new world of intelligent warehousing!