• EN
  • DE
  • AR
  • CN
MORE ABOUT EFESO DACH
EFESO Logo
  • Main topics
      Main topics
    • Bell Food Group
    • Future Factory
    • Digital Learning Platform
    • Sustainable Turn 2025
    • Net Zero by 2050
    • INDUSTRIE 4.0 AWARD
    • Best of Consulting Award
    • Topics & News
  • Company
      Company
    • EFESO Management Consultants
    • Team
    • Values
    • ESG responsibility
    • German Sustainability Award
    • Testimonials
    • Ecosystem Partner
    • Events
    • DIALOGUE Customer Magazine
    • Newsletter
  • Competences
      Competences
    • EFESO competences overview
    • Cost reduction
        Cost reduction
      • Cost down – performance-up
      • Zero-Based Organization
      • CapEx optimization
      • Next Gen OPEX
      • Cost Value Engineering
      • Digitalization Excellence
      • Maintenance Excellence
      • Inventory Excellence
      • Cost Reduction Approach
      • Product Industrialization & Ramp-up Management
    • Digitalization, Industry 4.0 and IIOT
        Digitalization, Industry 4.0 and IIOT
      • AI for Industrial Operations
      • Digitization as a performance driver
      • Future Factory
      • Data Analytics
      • Digital Twins
      • Analytics Dashboards
      • Smart Products & Services
      • IT architecture and platform consolidation
      • SAP PROJECT RECOVERY
      • Compliance & Security
      • Business Process Analysis, Management & Automisation
    • Manufacturing and Logistics
        Manufacturing and Logistics
      • Operational Excellence & WCOM
      • Next Gen OPEX
      • Zero-Based Organization
      • Lean production
      • Shop floor management
      • Digital shop floor management
      • TPM and OEE
      • Quality and process stability
      • Maintenance Excellence
      • Factory and layout planning
      • Production planning and control
      • Assembly and logistics
      • IT management in manufacturing
      • Digital Factory Twin
    • Procurement
    • Supply chain management
        Supply chain management
      • Supply Chain Strategy
      • Supply Chain Planning
      • Supply Chain Planning: S&OP, IBP
      • Circular Supply Chain
      • Digital Supply Chain Twin
    • Operations Footprint
        Operations Footprint
      • Manufacturing Footprint
      • Physical logistics
      • Inventory Excellence
    • Product and Service Development
        Product and Service Development
      • AI, Machine Learning and Analytics
      • Digital products and solutions
      • Resilience and sustainability of the organization
      • Value & Cost Engineering in R&D
      • Lean & Agile Development
      • Innovation management
      • Product Lifecycle Management
      • Complexity management & portfolio streamlining
    • Product Excellence
        Product Excellence
      • Product Profitability Excellence
      • Product Development Excellence
      • Product Machining Excellence
      • Product Manufacturing Excellence
    • Productivity increase
        Productivity increase
      • Productivity increase - Growth
      • Productivity increase - Stabilization
      • Productivity increase - Restructuring & Turnaround
    • Transformation & Leadership
        Transformation & Leadership
      • Leadership Assessment
      • Leadership Development
      • Performance Behaviour
      • Change Mobilisation
      • Change Communication
      • Sustainable Change Adoption
    • Sustainability
        Sustainability
      • Sustainable Transformation
      • Sustainable Products
      • Sustainable Production and Operations
      • Sustainable Supply Chain and Footprint
  • Industries
      Industries
    • EFESO industry experience
    • Aerospace
    • Automotive
    • Chemicals
    • Defense
    • Fibre-based packaging industry
    • Food & Beverage
    • Healthcare and MedTech
    • Sanitation and HVAC industry
    • High-tech and electronics
    • Machinery and plant construction
    • Commercial vehicles
    • Private Equity
    • Pharma industry
  • Insights
      Insights
    • Insights Overview
    • Product Excellence
    • Procurement
    • Supply Chain Management
    • Sales
    • Digital Transformation & Manufacturing
    • Cost & Value Engineering
    • Sustainability
    • Learning Campus
  • Case Studies
      Case Studies
    • Overview all Case Studies
    • Sustainability
    • Digitalization and Industry 4.0
    • Manufacturing and logistics
    • Supply chains and manufacturing footprint
    • Product and service development
    • Cost reduction
  • Learning Campus
      Learning Campus
    • EFESO Learning Campus
    • Our approach
    • In-house academy
    • Training Portfolio
    • Certification programs
    • Digital Learning Plattform
    • E-Learning
    • Mobile Learning Factory
    • Best Practice
    • Experts
  • Join Us
      Join Us
    • Career
    • Working at EFESO
    • Apply Now
Unbenannt-1
  • DE
  • EN
  • AR
  • CN
MORE ABOUT EFESO DACH
  • EFESO Management Consultants
  • Last Issue
  • ROI DIALOG Issue 56

(Kopie 1)

The deserted warehouse

By Dr. Wolfgang Keplinger, ROI Management Consulting AG

Warehouses and distribution centres of the future are more efficient, more reliable, faster, smarter - and, above all, deserted. Because robots are now so cheap and energy efficient that they have almost completely displaced the people there. What‘s more, they change the way people work there. The number of work steps is no longer key for the efficiency of a process - the operating costs of the individual robot is. The almost unlimited availability of robotic work is thus used to leverage huge efficiency gains and forever changes the look of the warehouses:

Dynamic localization 

Warehouse 4.0 will know dynamically, in real time, where the materials/articles are currently located - whether in intake or already on the way to the customer. The use of RFID and beacons then allows us to use Smart Boxes, Smart Bins and Smart Racks, with which any material can be localized at any time. If the products themselves become smarter, we no longer even need the support of “logistics RFIDs” because at that point the scanners in the warehouse will communicate directly with the smart products. With further development of known localization technologies (e.g. DGPS or UWB), methods such as geofencing will also be used within the warehouse in the future.

©cybrain/Shutterstock.com

Automation through Cobots and Picking Robots

Warehouse automation geared towards efficient goods-to-man systems has made considerable progress in recent years thanks to the development of shuttles. Their advantage: they are scalable, with one shuttle per level and aisle, they allow for higher storage/retrieval performance than a storage/retrieval unit (SRU) and are relatively insensitive if a shuttle ever fails. Since the moved masses are significantly lower than those of SRUs, the energy balance of a shuttle system is better than that of an SRU, an important argument in favour of green logistics.  
 

The almost unlimited availability of robotic work is thus used to leverage huge efficiency gains and forever changes the look of the warehouses.
 

Automatically Moved Racks

Amazon creates efficient nesting order picking with fully automatic robots that bring a whole shelf rack auto-propelled to the picking station by driving under the shelf and lifting it. The benefits for Amazon: The lack of travel time yields a 50% to 70% increase in efficiency for the company. Further advantages are the increase in storage density (articles stored per unit area), scalability of the system, insensitivity in case of failure of a robot, and low energy consumption. Besides robot manufacturer Kiva, which has been acquired by Amazon, Swisslog also offers a similar, highly efficient system for e-commerce providers or mail order companies with its Carry Picker. 

 

Short market cycles and volatile demands are forcing companies and logistics service providers to design their warehouse hardware in a standardized, scalable and flexible manner in the future.
 

Cellular/Collective Intelligence Shuttles

Transporting within the warehouse, from the warehouse to the dispatch area or from the warehouse to production or back again are handled more and more by AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles). In recent years, the vehicles have become smaller, more reliable, more autonomous in their control, more cost-effective and safer, and above all, independent of firmly laid out route guidance means such as cables, lines or markings. The vehicles control themselves more and more reliably through laser scanning and alignment to permanently installed orientation marks or by means of camera-based environmental/contour recognition.

While handling or transfer processes between the warehouse shuttles and the AGVs for further transport are still necessary today, in the future the shuttles could also travel to the shelf apron area and deliver the desired material directly to the picking station or into production. This eliminates yet another touch from the intra-logistics chain and brings us closer to a „no-/few-touch“ warehouse. The first attempts at a collective intelligence-based shuttle system that delivers directly from the shelf to order picking stations or production took place several years ago by the Fraunhofer Institute and Dematic, which made technological differences between racking and autonomous ground operations; but this solution is not yet economical.


Drones in the Warehouse

Drones performing the inventory in the warehouse no longer surprise anyone today. But where drones fly through the warehouse today and activate the RFID transponders of the stored products with an RFID reader, no drones will be heard in the future. Dynamic localization will make these deployments redundant. However, drones have a great future as a means of transport: In Warehouse 4.0, they will provide fast and direct exception express transport within a building, or even on short-haul routes. In this case, a drone could provide the much needed last link in a logistics chain to complete as extensive customer supply or start a production. Also conceivable is the use of drones in a clearly space-limited and outlined storage area, for example, to perform sorting tasks (from a track in KLTs or on pallets).

©SasinTipcha/shutterstock.com

Hubs2Move & Virtualization of Warehouses

Short market cycles and volatile demands are forcing companies and logistics service providers to design their warehouse hardware in a standardized, scalable and flexible manner in the future. This is the only way warehouses can be adapted to the changing needs of customers. The next steps in this direction will then be to make the warehouses more portable (transfer from location A to location B) and more virtual. In this case, the physical transport of products could be largely replaced by a „transport of information“ over the internet. The customer then creates the final products himself by means of additive manufacturing/3D printing at the place of need. 

The best warehouse is not a warehouse. The „advanced technologies“ are working to fine-tune the last bas-tions of stacking and layering. Through a mix of LEAN methods, digitalization, automation, mobilization and flexibilisation, the traditional warehouse not only loses its importance, but also more and more any physical substance. The notorious last one to switch off the light will certainly not be human. And therefore probably did not need the light on to begin with. 

Downloads:

ROI DIALOG #56 - EN - The deserted Warehouse

1 MB

download

Back
 EFESO Management Consultants Logo

EFESO Management Consultants Infanteriestrasse 11
D-80797 Munich
Germany

Phone: +49 89 1215 90-0
Fax: +49 89 1215 90-10
kontakt.dach@efeso.com

EFESO
  • Berlin
  • Bielefeld
  • Friedrichshafen
  • Puch
  • Mannheim
  • Munich
  • Stuttgart
  • Vienna
  • Legal Notice
  • Accessibility Information
  • Data protection policy
  • Search
  • Glossary
  • Sitemap
Privacy Setting

DIALOG Order our magazine

Newsletter Register our newsletter

© 2025 – EFESO Management Consultants
Webdesign und Development ALEKS&SHANTU

About Cookies

This website uses cookies. Those have two functions: On the one hand they are providing basic functionality for this website. On the other hand they allow us to improve our content for you by saving and analyzing anonymized user data. You can redraw your consent to using these cookies at any time. Find more information regarding cookies on our Data Protection Declaration and regarding us on the Imprint.

Click here for Cookie Settings.

Mandatory

These cookies are needed for a smooth operation of our website.

NamePurposeLifetimeTypeProvider
CookieConsent Saves your consent to using cookies. 1 year HTML Website
fe_typo_user Assigns your browser to a session on the server. session HTTP Website
Marketing

With the help of these cookies we strive to improve our offer for our users. By means of anonymized data of website users we can optimize the user flow. This enables us to improve ads and website content.

NamePurposeLifetimeTypeProvider
_ga Used to distinguish users. 2 years HTML Google
_gid Used to distinguish users. 1 day HTML Google
_ga_--container-id-- Persists session state. 2 years HTML Google
_gac_bg_--container-id-- missing translation: trackingobject._gac_bg_--container-id--.desc 3 months HTML Google
AnalyticsSyncHistory missing translation: trackingobject.AnalyticsSyncHistory.desc 1 month HTML LinkedIn
UserMatchHistory missing translation: trackingobject.UserMatchHistory.desc 1 month HTML LinkedIn
bcookie Browser Identifier cookie to uniquely identify devices accessing LinkedIn to detect abuse on the platform. 1 year HTML LinkedIn
li_sugr missing translation: trackingobject.li_sugr.desc 3 month HTML LinkedIn
lidc missing translation: trackingobject.lidc.desc 1 day HTML LinkedIn
ln_or missing translation: trackingobject.ln_or.desc 1 day HTML Oribi