Inventory Drones
What are Inventory Drones
Inventory drones are an exciting new development in the arena of warehouse automation. They are one of the least capital intensive ways to get new robotic technology into the warehouse and they can have a significant impact on reserve pallet inventory accuracy.
Drones are used to fly around pallet reserve storage locations and compare actual pallet occupancy to expected occupancy information from your WMS system. When a discrepancy is observed the location is flagged for human intervention. For example a pallet in a position that was expected to be empty, or an unoccupied location that was expected to have a pallet in it would trigger such a flag.
You may think “my operators are scanning the pallets into and out of reserve locations” so our reserve inventory is accurate. This might be true. But more often than not, someone may accidentally scan the correct location but place the pallet above or below the intended location.
Then along comes another operator, and they intentionally scan the indicated location but place the pallet in a nearby empty location. Pretty soon you have a cascading issue of misplaced pallets. When someone goes to retrieve one of these pallets, they waste valuable time search of the missing load. Worst case, it is not found in time and orders get shorted.
Implementing a drone solution is a relatively easy project in comparison to some of the other robotic projects. Integration in one way, typically only involving a download of reserve pallet positions from the WMS. The payback for such systems is often less than a year.
Clients wishing to learn more about drone technology and the vendors that provide solutions can access the drone section in their client portal.
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