Logistics Automation - The Next Generation of Industrial Automation

In today’s highly competitive and demanding society, consumer needs are becoming more and more diversified. So how can organizations meet these diverse needs, in an efficient and timely manner? Improving and innovating logistics operations has become a major theme for most companies. As industrial automation takes over the shop floor, automating a host of manufacturing processes, it is also automating many of the activities involved in logistics across industries such as medical devices, food, publication, apparel and transport.

Logistics Automation

Logistics automation makes use of various control systems for operating factory equipment, with minimal or reduced human intervention. It streamlines the process of planning the movement of procured and sold goods in the supply chain, and helps decrease costs (and risks) while improving overall customer service. Logistics automation enables organizations to efficiently and effectively manage their transportation and freight departments. Using logistics automation, organizations can decrease manual entry of processing freight shipments and automate retrieval of goods. What’s more, logistics automation provides automatic notifications and real time updates of freight information.

Benefits

The biggest benefit of logistics automation is that it saves labor; it also helps in optimum use of resources, enabling organizations to save energy and also improve quality, accuracy and precision. However, there are several other benefits too. Let’s look at some of them:

1. Access to Real Time Freight Data: Imagine if your customer contacts you to check where the shipment has reached, and you do not have an answer to provide! With logistics automation, you can have access to real time freight data with ability to run reports. This way you are in a better position to make business decisions based on your trends and history. Access to valuable data at your fingertips empowers you to see the total cost of your decisions and mitigate future costly and awful decisions.
2. Access to Real-time Freight Rates:  Combating rising transportation costs has become a major challenge for logistics companies. Logistics automation makes it easy for users to execute policies that deliver immediate freight savings. Built with state-of-the-art web services architecture, these systems receive live carrier rates. When you have multiple carriers to choose from based on cost, delivery time, and insurance, you can make the best choice and save money over the long haul.
3. Reduction in (Costly) Errors: The risk of manual data entry errors often leads to increased shipping costs – you might end up paying for shipping twice or pay a higher freight rate as a result of having entered incorrect data. With logistics automation features such as integration to your commodities or automatic entry of fuel surcharges, you never have to worry about keying in the wrong information.
4. Increased Customer Service: Imagine how high a price you have to pay when you lose a customer due to poor service? With logistics automation features such as real time freight tracking, and auto pick-up built to your custom specifications, you can empower your customers to know exactly how much the freight will cost and when the freight will arrive through regular notifications.  
5. Enhanced Scalability and Speed: In a fast moving world, addressing customers with speed and agility is the need of the hour. With powerful logistics automation features in your system, you need no additional resources to manage your transportation department, even as your business grows. Quickly and easily input new users into the system, manage them with a simple click of a button, and consolidate invoices based on your requirement.
6. Improved Organizational Control: Isn’t managing a multitude of logistics operations using different systems a harrowing experience? With a logistics automation system, you can seamlessly control all of your operations through a single system – from managing your freight, to tracking costs and risks. You can accommodate custom business rules, and follow policies that ensure efficient and cost effective shipping and have more control over your operations.

Improve your Bottom Line

Automation, when employed correctly, drives many benefits to help your bottom line. Whether it's automation through the use of robots on the shop floor, or features that eliminate manual process, or capabilities that give instant access to information seamlessly - one thing is for sure, automation helps simplify and streamline logistics, enabling organizations to drive efficiency, eliminate waste, and most importantly save money.  

Industrial Automation Benefits for Superior Business Outcomes

In the last 2 decades, technology has transformed the nature of manufacturing. From the days when manufacturing and fabrication were all done by hand, computers and technology have penetrated the industry, enabling companies to mass produce products at outstanding speeds and with great repeatability and quality. Today, automation has become a determining factor in whether or not a company will stay competitive in the manufacturing industry.

Benefitting from Industrial Automation

The industrial automation space is fuelled by new control technologies, technologies that are optimized for high accuracy and quality across industrial processes. By embedding industrial equipment with sensors, industrial automation enables devices to control manufacturing and production processes and make them more efficient. In contrast to manual systems, industrial automation provides superior benefits in terms of accuracy, power and speed of the process performance. Industrial automation replaces manual processes and reduces human intervention to a large extent for increased efficiency. Let’s look at some of the top benefits:  

1  Improved Workforce Productivity: We live in an environment that’s challenged by severe competition. Industrial Automation boosts the rate of production and helps enterprises achieve greater results. Since it is impossible for humans to work long hours with extreme accuracy, automated systems can help control work hours by carrying out complex and dangerous tasks and letting humans spend more time on supervising the operations.  

2      Superior Product Quality: Very often, manual operations in the manufacturing process can result in a compromise on the quality of the product specification. Through Industrial Automation, manufacturers can perform operations with greater compatibility and consistency and meet the required quality standards. Automation ensures the product is manufactured with the same specifications and process every time, with fewer repairs and maintenance activities.

3   Reduced Production Costs: Industrial Automation help the industry save substantial costs; by replacing human tasks with automated systems, manufacturers can reduce the unit cost of production. Automation equipment that are seamlessly unified for 24×7 operation not only increase productivity, but also, lead to an excellent return on investment by saving on employee salaries and other labor costs. Automated systems also reduce scarcity of workforce by introducing automated processes in the workplace.

4  Enhanced Plant Operations: With industrial automation, manufacturers canenable remote maintenance and monitoring; machine builders and system integrators can see where the biggest challenges are in their systems and refine them to create better products. Reprogrammable robots can make production more flexible, thanks to their ability to connect to the cloud. Robots can be easily reconfigured and reprogrammed to perform a multitude of different tasks depending on the application and helping enhance plant operations in industries where processes change quickly to meet demand.

5.     Quick Mobile Access: As industrial automation takes over the shop floor, plant managers will be able to track machine performance and process data from anywhere in the plant, and possibly even from their homes. Mobile access is especially important for enterprises that have with machines in remote locations. IIoT by making it easier to connect multiple systems, communicate with the cloud, and present information in a way that is can be easily understood and acted on.

6     Improved Health and Safety: Industrial Automation enables wearable tech to integrate real time data and information without hassle. Using wearables, equipment operators can have real time access to critical data. In an increasingly automated environment, wearable tech can help improve collaboration between humans and robots or automated systems, helping improve health and safety through the use of helmets and watches that contain sensors linked to supervisors and control centres. Such devices could also alert employees of any potential hazards, without distraction from the job at hand.

         Reduced Waste: Industrial automation decreases footprint of a work area by automating parts of the production line. Factory managers can efficiently utilize the floor space for other operations and make the process flow more efficient. The use of robots ensures only the exact amount of raw material is used, decreasing costs on waste.

Conclusion

Industrial Automation is improving worker safety and productivity, and moving workers from performing site operations to participating effectively in supervisory roles. Industrial automation systems with high computing power can capture, process and analyze humongous amounts of data from the factory floor that can further be used to improve productivity, and avoid downtime through predictive maintenance. 

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Industrial Automation

To most people, Artificial Intelligence (AI) probably means sci-fi movies with robots and computers performing inconceivable human tasks. While this is partly true, what AI truly brings to the table is enabling machines to carry out intelligent tasks. As the challenges faced by global decision makers skyrocket, there is an urgent need to propel businesses and societies forward using the most modern technology. With the world changing at an unprecedented speed, businesses need to revamp and restructure how machines and humans work. And AI is helping meet those goals. According to Forrester, Cognitive technologies such as robots, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation will replace 7% of US jobs by 2025.

The Changing Dynamics

The manufacturing sector is characterized by an environment full of uncertainties and evolving dynamics. With ever growing market volatility, manufacturers need to constantly innovate, adapt and respond to changes in the quickest time, without hampering the quality of products, and at the least possible cost. The efficiency of a manufacturing system closely depends on how well shop floor processes respond to changes. Critical shop floor functions such as production scheduling and maintenance have to be extremely responsiveness, and their integration is what will result in an optimal and robust decision making environment.

AI in Manufacturing

AI finds application in a host of industries including gaming, banking, retail, commercial, and government, and is slowly becoming pervasive in the manufacturing sector, facilitating the automation of industries. AI-driven machines are paving an easier path to the future by providing a host of benefits – offering new opportunities, improving production efficiencies, and bringing machine interaction closer to human interaction. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is being driven by the automation of knowledge-based work; by creating new ways to automate tasks, we can restructure the way humans and machines live and interact, to create a better, stronger digital economy.

AI helps overcome many inherent challenges that have been plaguing the industry: from scarcity of expertise, to decision complexity, integration issues, and information overload. Adopting AI on the shop floor enables businesses to completely transform their processes. Let’s look at what AI is helping the manufacturing sector to achieve:

 ·      Process Automation: The use of AI and robots is particularly appealing in industrial manufacturing as they revolutionize mass-production. Robots are capable of doing repetitive tasks, streamlining the production model, increasing capacity, eliminating human error and delivering higher levels of quality assurance.

·       Round-the-clock Production: While humans are forced to work in 3 shifts to ensure continuous production, robots can enable a nonstop, 24/7 production line. Businesses can augment their production capabilities and meet the growing demand of customers worldwide.

·       Safer Working Conditions: With several mishaps happening on the shop floor, a shift towards AI means fewer people are have to carry out dangerous and overly laborious work. As robots replace humans and perform mundane and risky tasks, the number of workplace casualties will plummet all across.

·      New Opportunities for Humans: As AI takes over the shopfloor and automates boring and mundane human tasks, workers will get to focus on complex and innovative tasks. While AI takes care of menial labour, humans can focus on driving innovation and steering their business to newer heights.

·    Reduced Operating Expenditure: Although bringing AI onto the shopfloor would require a massive capital investment, the ROI is substantially higher. As intelligent machines start taking care of day-to-day-activities, businesses can enjoy significantly lower overhead.

Benefits

AI and industrial automation have progressed considerably in recent years. Development in machine learning techniques, advances in sensors and the growth of computing power have helped create a new generation of robots. AI helps enables machines to collect and extract knowledge, recognize patterns, and learn and adapt to new situations or environments through machine intelligence, learning and speech recognition. Using AI, manufacturers can:

• Make faster, data driven decision
• Enable better production outcomes
• Improve process efficiency
• Lower operational cost
• Enable greater scalability
• Facilitate product innovation

Improving Business Outcomes

The key driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the speed at which it is happening. With technology now at our fingertips, businesses (and even industries) can scale up with the blink of the eye, ultimately changing the way we live our daily lives (and in a fraction of the time). Using AI, industry leaders and technology pioneers can create the right platforms and solutions, ultimately improving business outcomes and driving success in today’s ever-growing digital economy.