Core Methodologies in Data Warehouse Design

Discuss about the Core Methodologies in Data Warehouse Design.

The combination of technology, market forces and economic has constrained the companies for examining the supply chain strategies (Bogue and Bogue 2016). This had included globalization of businesses, the propagation of variety of products, increase in complexity of supply networks and shortening of the life cycle of the product. To keep the competitiveness the companies have strived for the achievement of greater goals, coordination and collaboration within the approaches of the supply chain generally called the integration of supply chain. E-Business is different from E-commerce that can be used for describing the adoption of internet to accelerate the goal of supply chain integration (Burke and Ewing 2014). There is significance on the impact of e-business in supply chain integration. Several new technologies, models and strategies have been developed for the adoption of e-business approach for the supply chain integration. The organization by adopting the e-business approaches can realize dramatic return by efficient improvement, utilization of assets in a better way, reducing the total order fulfillment time, enhancing the customer service and having higher stakeholders value.

Here, in this report we are going to explain the aspect of Warehouse Robotics. The aim is to assist the industry and suppliers. In identifying, developing and implementing a technology discussed as part of the course that will assist in efficient sand more effective supply chain management that provides practical assistance, guidance and support. Identifying and explaining the strategic approaches of Warehouse robotics, related to the supply chain in e-business. Defining the technology, its benefits and challenges associated. The places and technique of how this technology can be implemented and the risks associated with it. Further discussing the future scope of this technology. Along with an appropriate implementation in a case study.

Warehouse robotics is the way of technical approach for the sorting, managing and developing the industrial efficiency in a more cost effective and dynamic way. Several new technologies, models and strategies have been developed for the adoption of e-business approach for the supply chain integration (Culler and Long 2016). The organization by adopting the e-business approaches can realize dramatic return by efficient improvement, utilization of assets in a better way, reducing the total order fulfillment time, enhancing the customer service and having higher stakeholders value. The robotics can be further classified into two segments: Service robotics and Industrial robotics. This technology are been integrated in businesses industries that posses aspects like storage, transportation and dispatch production. Initially these robots are designed to maintain the warehouse and hence manufacture the production process like packaging, sorting, palletizing, assembling, disassembling, replenishment, sorting, consolidation, inspection and transportation of products and much more (Dadzie, Johnston and Sadchev 2015).

Evaluation of Warehouse Robotics

There has been an exponential increase in the past decades on the number of shopping customers in online, across many countries. The preference of these customers is to order products online and expect a fast delivery of ordered goods to be dispatched directly to their door steps (Ewing 2015). Many traditional stores or warehouses because of this type of shopping habits, are no longer satisfies the demand of online shopping customers. This technology are been integrated in businesses industries that posses aspects like storage, transportation and dispatch production. Initially these robots are designed to maintain the warehouse and hence manufacture the production process like packaging, sorting, palletizing, assembling, disassembling, replenishment, sorting, consolidation, inspection and transportation of products and much more (Yao et al. 2013). The future generation warehouses may be designed and implemented a been found in a literature study, it also showed that more centralized distribution centers that partly replace traditional stores of manufacturer, retailers and the suppliers in some countries. As a key element of distribution centers for storing, picking and dispatching goods, it is requires a novel design of retrieval systems and cost-effective storage (Gadd and Newman 2015). The fast-growing IT technologies are Implementation and integration that has demonstrated a great improvement of opportunities in a warehouse in terms of shorter response time, tighter inventory control and greater variety of SKUs (stock keeping units). These IT capabilities can be enhanced by using smart-labels such as automatic identification (Auto-ID) sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags (to replace traditional barcode-labels, together with cable and/or wireless communication networks and indoor warehouse management systems (You and Ji 2014).

Warehouse robotics is one of the most wanted as well as most interesting trends in the market now-a-days. The automated workers in the warehouse are the most well known and helpful in any organization utilizing it. Amazon.com’s Kiva robots are the most often used to identify products and barcode readers that are found and get stored in the warehouse and is then moved to the delivery and shipping queue (Jain and Sharma 2017). There are several advantages for using this technique as well as some disadvantages.

Advantages

1. Lesser need of human workers
2. Does more than one task at a time
3. Saves money of the organization such that the company does not have to pay much to the employees
4. Work is done 24/7, since machines does not need rest. Hence the warehouse is never needed to be closed.
5. Lesser need of heavy equipments
6. Less probability of occurrence of accidents
7. No worrying for the slipping off of the vehicles that has been placed improperly
8. Less paying attention on silly things
9. Robots designed keeping the safety issues in mind of the developer and are programmed accordingly
10. Assurance of the safety of the people, product and environment
11. Smaller size of robots than the forklifts
12. The aisles between the shelves will need lesser space and are hence made narrower that improves the space in the warehouse
13. These space can be utilized or can also be rented by the organization
14. There is a conversion of warehouse in a robot-friendly zone

Disadvantages

1. Robots cannot adapt the situational changes
2. Identification of the products if fluctuates, the robots will show an error and want assistance
3. The products must be labeled clearly since the robot cannot identify unreadable labels
4. The products are required to be packed and stored in various ways such that the robots can handle with it
5. There can be a complete replacement if all the shelves in the warehouse
6. To make use of these robots the businesses must build an entirely new high-tech warehouse
7. Increase the expense
8. The conveyor belts, robots and other necessary machineries must be monitored and hence maintained accordingly for best outcome
9. The people monitoring and maintain the machines ask for high payment since there needs a high educational training for the automated systems.
10. The high expense may lead the business appraisals to get delayed for the implementation of an automated warehousing.
11. Small scaled companies because of the costing may not implement these technologies since they would not be able to afford it.

Implementation of Warehouse Robotics                     

The robotics warehousing systems are exceeding the limits of automation for the efficiency and increase in productivity for the technological field as well as the business field (Huang, Chen and Pan 2015). The exceptionally dynamic and unpredictable natures of the warehouse are successfully implemented in some main are of challenges faced while warehousing. These are:

Navigation in dynamic environments: There is a constant change in the environment of warehouse because of the movement of the products. This makes it quite challenging for the robots to adapt and understand the change occurred in the surrounding such that for the proper functioning and productivity (Johnson et al. 2016). The change in appearance of the object can be either it is different or remarkably similar must be differentiated by the robots in order to be able to recognize and hence when placed in an awkward situation can find the way out.

Adapting to obstacles and new variables: There can be a number of obstacles resulting from the constant movement of the machineries, people etc that appears frequently in an aisles. In aspect of the challenges faces the best path for the warehouse operations the products are often placed in a haphazard manner or in an unorganized way and hence displays no guarantees for the protection of the products. The database of inventory has to be updated in anything that approaches the real time. For an example, there came a time when the SKUs come with a wide range of shapes and sizes and even weights the robots needed to learn and adapt to.

Manipulation of the items: after overcoming the challenges by the robot for inherent in finding the objects there is a need of getting the items off the shelves and put it in the boxes. There are several attempts by the robots dealing with the dynamic nature of the items outlined. But there is always a lack in the robustness adaptive nature of the robotic system. The robots are designed to handle the challenges faced for manipulation of the items. The most challenging part is to create a robotic arm that may handle the large variety of item size keeping the cost effectiveness within mind. This results in the requirement of the people to put the cargo on and off the delivery system of the robots, lessening the automation. The automation to manipulate the objects are thus done by customizing. Since the warehouse does not have any fixed traffic flow the fixed automations fails miserably in the dynamic environment of the average warehouse. The random orders coming every hour must be delivered in time. Seasonality also affects traffic flow within the warehouse.

ROI and Costs: The total cost of implementation of robotic solution must be less than the efficiency and productivity profited by summing up them to the existing system and labor. If this does not happen then the warehouse will become less competitive to other organizations. Existing solutions have been extremely cost prohibitive to many warehouses, often requiring a huge upfront commitment to handle even average amounts of throughput and only achieving a ROI after more than five years (Wan et al. 2017). The rapid advancing technologies may result in outdating of a few year back system as compared to the brand new system in market, so there should always be an option for the frequent update of the system.

A case study of SVR has invented the ‘Fetch Robotics bringing warehouse to life’. For the logistics industry, the Fetch Robotics builds the robot systems. The company has its headquarters in San Jose, CA and was founded in 2014 (Kehoe et al. 2015). Fetch Robotics system is comprised of a mobile base (called Freight) and an advanced mobile manipulator (called Fetch). Fetch and Freight use a charging dock for continuous operations autonomously, and allows the robots to charge whenever needed to and then continues with tasks they have. Warehouse Robotics has now being much preferred over manual workers for profiling, sorting, dispatching and carrying out other tasks, since there is a greater chance higher rate of efficiency and customer satisfaction. This change may benefit the performance of the analysis and hence increase the market value of the industry (Winfield 2014).

The company also uses system software for supporting the integrating robotics warehouse environment. These robots were initially designed to work independently along with the human workers performing repetitive tasks such as pick and pack, warehouse delivery, and other things. This technique also reduces the operating cost in the long run (Kimura et al. 2015). The difficulties faced by the warehouse and then the remedies provided to the difficulties by atomization, it is flexible enough for the industries to intake the changes.

The current values proposed by the Fetch Robotics are: Throughput and Understanding the events happing each day in the warehouse. The logistic managers take decisions on the basis of the old data and information (Kumar et al. 2017). This technology has undergone several trials by processing in several commercial deployments and selling robots into research.

The pair of robots Fetch and Freight while working autonomously works as a team. Fetch is a robot of mobile manipulation. Freight is a mobile robot. Fetch and Freight is programmed in such a way that one weighs and picks up the objects while the other one helps in the transportation in the warehouse respectively. The environmental factors that contribute to Fetch are ROS (Liang et al. 2015). The computational power has caught some of the algorithms that have changed the way of implementation of the technology like the sensor technology. 

Some other examples of case study is Robotics in Logistics: An emerging technology trend that greatly affect the future in a positive way like the medical informatics, gene sequencing, sustainable energy, 3D printing, big data analytics and self-driving cars. Another major technology trend is the development of advanced robotics that has a profound and positive impact on society. Robotics technology has not made a large impact in the world of logistics that has the tendency to change the robotics in the warehousing, The workers in logistics workers gets benefited from the collaboration with robots, and the consumers gets faster service and better quality of products. Logistics supply chain hence is faster, safer and much productive (López et al. 2015).

Risks associated with Warehouse Robotics

The technological branch that deals with designing, constructing, operating and applications of robots are defined as the robotics (Lu et al. 2014). There are several risk hazards that are to be taken care of in the organization:

• Human Errors: This occurs in everyday activities and there is no difference regarding the robotics working cell. There is a potential of the authority to place the companies in a hazardous position for the lack of knowledge of the motion path of robots, or maintenance issues, error programming and much more.
• Control Errors: The errors in the hardware and in the control software may lead to hazardous event in the working cell of robotics. The control system may create fault in the system response which is harmful for the working environment if it is directly connected to the human interface (Terdiman 2015).
• Unauthorized Access: There is high chance for the operators either authorized or unauthorized to find themselves in a critical situation creating a dangerous and potential fatal area if not familiar to the working robotics cell.
• Mechanical Failure: There can be situations where the designs and programming may face issues. The mechanical part may fail in the undergoing process or experiment. When such unexpected failure occurs it may lead to potential hazardous situation for the operators.
• Environmental Sources: factors regarding communication interface and other outside factor. The power loss may lead to serious injury during the planning of the initial stage of the project (Schwarz et al. 2017).
• Power Systems: The sources of power having communication over to the robotic cells can lead to disruption and undesirable action. Production of energy release and hence creation of a risky environment for the workers and operators.
• Improper Installation: There should be maintenance of safety of the operators in the installation of the system. Incorrect installation may lead to malfunction in th setup or robotics work cell, future hazards may occur due to the variance from the original programming and design.

Despite of these potential risks in the robotics industry, there are ways for the prevention of these risks to happen as long as the workers are well trained, have knowledge of the robotic system and the integrators have reached the job requirement which includes proper programming, installation of the system and risk assessment (Ma et al. 2017).

Future scope

The rapid growth of Warehouse Robotics and expansion of their functionalities in various industries have had a huge impact in the market of e-business. As explained in the section the robotics can be further classified into two segments: Service robotics and Industrial robotics. This technology are been integrated in businesses industries that posses aspects like storage, transportation and dispatch production (Markowitz et al. 2013). Initially these robots are designed to maintain the warehouse and hence manufacture the production process like packaging, sorting, palletizing, assembling, disassembling, replenishment, sorting, consolidation, inspection and transportation of products and much more. But as time passed the robots are initiated as AI (Artificial Intelligence) (Zhuravska and Popel 2014). The market of robotics manufacture hence is mainly divided into four segments: By Type, By Function, By Industry and By Geography. Despite of the slow up taking of the industries there are several new benefits of robotics and automation technologies which are well understood and has the ability for supporting zero defects and enabling new productivity. The new generation of  robots are quite different as compared to older generation, they are more flexible, lighter, easier to program and are more affordable because of the swift progress in sensor technology and available grip. Combination of micro technologies and the ability to create a compact and collaborative robot the industries are finally able to see the automation become real in the supply chain process. The success in business will be for those who are adopting the accelerated change in the sourcing, production and distribution of the robotics industry agile and flexible enough to take in the advantaged provided by the new technologies.

Conclusion

Warehouse Robotics has now being much preferred over manual workers for profiling, sorting, dispatching and carrying out other tasks, since there is a greater chance higher rate of efficiency and customer satisfaction (Pagliarini and Lund 2017). The combination of technology, market forces and economic has constrained the companies for examining the supply chain strategies. This had included globalization of businesses, the propagation of variety of products, increase in complexity of supply networks and shortening of the life cycle of the product. This technique also reduces the operating cost in the long run (Pagliarini and Lund 2017). The difficulties faced by the warehouse and then the remedies provided to the difficulties by atomization, it is flexible enough for the industries to intake the changes. This change may benefit the performance of the analysis and hence increase the market value of the industry.

References

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Burke, E.M. and Ewing Jr, D.L., 2014. Improving warehouse inventory management through RFID, barcoding and robotics technologies. NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND PUBLIC POLICY.

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