What does an automated warehouse system mean? Let’s find out together.
A traditional warehouse, in which it is the operator who moves towards the goods, not only represents an activity that endangers the health and safety of workers but also is the source of significant inefficiencies and waste, together with a notable drop in productivity.
The “person to goods” principle is mainly used by companies with a low level of innovation or those starting out with a very low initial investment in traditional shelving, encounter many critical issues: picking errors, loss or theft, damaged goods, obsolescence and perishability, stock outages as well as long order preparation times.
“Goods to Person” refers to an automated picking method enabled by the use of an automated warehouse system.
In companies that adopt this logic, the operator is no longer forced to move around the warehouse to search for and pick the desired good. Instead all the item search or order fulfilment operations can be carried out at the picking/refilling station of the automated warehouse system, designed according to ergonomic and safety criteria. After the operator has carried out the item search or processed the picking list from the PC workstation, the internal handling system will pick up the loading unit that contains the item and bring it directly to the picking/refilling station.
All the advantages of automatic picking
- Immediate availability of materials
- Automatic and safe provision of stock
- Reduced picking times and increased productivity
- Reduction in picking errors
- Reduction in damage to goods
- Increased operator safety and reduced accident rates
- Real-time monitoring of stock and automatic inventory
ICAM: vertical lift modules, automated stores and collection points designed around the people who use them
Behind every intelligent solution from ICAM, designed for logistics and the Supply Chain, we put people at the centre of what we do: be it our SILO² VLM or our horizontal automated warehouse RIGO, all of our ICAM automated warehouse systems provide extremely fast, efficient and precise picking, thereby keeping manual tasks and picker movements to a minimum.
To handle heavy or bulky loads, especially in industrial environments, picking manipulators, robots or cobots can be integrated into the picking/refilling station.
IRIDE, our innovative multimedia and interactive system for the management and control of SILO² multi-colums VLM far exceeds traditional Pick-to-Light systems, guiding the operator step-by-step through the picking and refilling operations: beams of colored light illuminate the compartment containing the material to be picked, while all the related information (e.g. quantity and type of item) is projected onto the digital dashboard (Head-up Digital Dashboard), right in front of the operator. The operator then can, in real time, interact with this data by modifying the number of items to be picked or refilled, confirm or cancel the operation thanks to the button panel in the picking/refilling station without having to return to the onboard PC.