No, our order pickers have not been replaced by robots or cobots.
After the installation of our fully automatic packing line at the end of last year, we set to work to further optimize our intralogistics flow.
Robotization or mechanization only comes into its own when everything is right under the hood.
And under that hood, we’ve been working hard in recent months.
By incorporating automated scripts, artificial intelligence and lots of mathematical formulas, we have made our warehouse management software a lot smarter.
At the end of 2017, we realized that just like in other industries, having and controlling big data would become very important.
Even then, we started collecting as much data as possible regarding all the processes in our warehouse.
This ranges from logging every movement to effectively collecting all master data and setting specific parameters for each product that is in our warehouse.
Our customers have also participated in this.
They can do a lot of settings in our online platform at the product level or, for example, set general packaging and shipping instructions to make our service fit their needs as closely as possible.
Thanks to our big-data, we not only find the best located and most efficient storage place for a product.
But we also calculate within a minute of receiving an order how and in which box it will be packed and shipped, whether it contains fragile products and also determine according to criteria set by the customer with which carrier this order will be shipped.
The shipping label is also requested immediately so that no delays can occur.
So within a minute after an e-commerce order arrives in our fulfillment center, we know how it will be packed, approximately when this will be and with which carrier it will be shipped.
So all this artificial intelligence and prediction allows our order pickers to work virtually on autopilot. Do we no longer need order pickers then? Absolutely not.
60% of the orders can be processed on autopilot.
This means that our people can spend more time on the other 40% of webshop orders that require more manual handling.
This results in better quality. So hasn’t order picking become incredibly boring? No, we ensure sufficient rotation of tasks among our warehouse workers.
We do believe that order picking will be almost fully automated in the future, but there are plenty of other challenging tasks that will still be done by humans.
We try to prepare our people for this.
We saw the results of this approach almost immediately.
We have a faster, higher and more qualitative outflow of packages.
Looking for e-commerce fulfillment?
Do you have a successful webshop operating in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, UK and Germany?
Does our approach seem like something that fits your webshop or e-business?
Then drop by for a cup of coffee!