Companies are accelerating investment in warehouse automation to address mounting pressures for speed, efficiency, and resilience in their supply chains. Rising e-commerce demand, labor shortages, and increasing customer expectations for rapid fulfillment have exposed the limits of manual operations. Automation technologies—such as autonomous mobile robots, automated storage and retrieval systems, and intelligent picking solutions—enable higher throughput, improved accuracy, and lower operating costs while reducing dependency on scarce labor. Additionally, automation provides scalability and data visibility that allow companies to adapt quickly to demand fluctuations and supply disruptions.
SCT provides automation assessments to quickly identify high impact, high value opportunities to implement automation solutions while simultaneously establishing cost effective infrastructure in systems, processes, and maintenance for the implementation and long term viability of those solutions.
SCT’s Approach To Automation Opportunity Assessments
Phase 1 – Discovery & Stakeholder Alignment
The initial phase of the project is focused on data gathering to develop an understanding of the current network and facility footprints, as well as planned and potential impacts from shifting demand or business strategy that can impact operational needs. In parallel, we offer cross-education to gain alignment on critical success factors across steering committee comprised of the leadership team and SCT engagement leads. Critical activities and deliverables include:
We’ll dive deep into organizational structure, supply chain facilities and functions, technology footprints, Operational KPIs and business performance from recent years.
This begins with accumulating available data on site characteristics across the network, IT architecture, organizational structures, and current state KPIs (as well as trending performance).
Site visits provide critical first hand views of operational strengths and weaknesses. Getting into representative facilities, walking the floor with subject matter experts from executives to floor supervisors and associates allows us to attain a robust view of the operational needs and opportunities. Executive interviews ensure key stakeholder input is also gathered to ensure pain points as well as constraints are included in the development of the assessment.
Grouping of sites (or areas within sites) with common characteristics allow SCT to quickly evaluate the potential impact of automation on shared services or common operations. The segmentation process will evaluate similar types and size of facilities, typically sharing similar volume profiles and order processing methods.
Phase 2 – Analysis
Deep understanding of SKU and order profiles, facility layouts and constraints, demand forecasts and potential impacts from strategic initiatives and growth strategies (including M&A) allows SCT to develop the models for advanced analysis of capacity and throughput needs, marrying those to potential automation solutions (as well as lower cost manual options). The analysis will allow us to segment facility templates and align those templates to automation opportunities for a comprehensive assessment.
Aggregating data across disparate technologies and footprints can be challenging, but is critical to attaining a common understanding across the facilities in preparation of more advanced modeling activities. Analysis will include the following:
- Product Classification Based On Order Profiles, UOMs, Dimensions, Velocities
- Facility Design Options Based on Storage & Selection Requirements
- Equipment & Process Options Based on Fulfillment Objectives
- Forecasted Volume Growth Projections
In evaluating the readiness of your network or operation for automation, it is critical to begin with an assessment of the health of your warehousing processes. Our advisors provide clarity in assessing capabilities relative to industry peers – identifying opportunities for improvement and differentiation. We bring perspective to challenge organizational norms and help to identify low-cost operational improvements that streamline operations and lay the groundwork for subsequent investments in automation.
For the official readout of findings, SCT will facilitate a workshop that outlines business priorities, considers areas of investment critical to discussion amongst the team, and invoke participation to ensure individual priorities are understood across the team in the context of overall strategy. This consensus building exercise delivers a shared commitment to success across the leadership team. Finally, we’ll consider organizational capabilities and sourcing strategies (in house vs outsourced) across IT services, monitoring, and maintenance that reinforces potential challenges in the long term viability of automation investments, setting the stage for deeper strategic development of the relationships and skills needed for an optimal automation strategy.
The end result is a cost / benefit assessment and prioritized list of automation opportunities to be pursued, with an outline of strategic and tactical follow ups to prepare for the roadmap development and justification of those initiatives, and the areas needing deeper analysis for scoping, staffing, and budgeting to ultimately align the budgets, vendor proposals, and organizational actions needed for success.
Feedback into these options from the steering committee provides a critical gate prior to diving deeper into roadmap development and implementation planning, as it will filter out any non-starters while driving focus into some options where concerns exist for deeper vetting and definition of options.
Phase 3 – Automation Impact Assessment
The impact assessment brings together a prioritized set of recommendations for investment in automation with a view of impact and complexity, and couples these recommendations with a broader set of critical considerations about the organizational impacts of that program – including infrastructure requirements for integration, monitoring, and maintenance, as well as staffing requirements for steady state monitoring and maintenance.
An evaluation of current state operations KPIs, analytics, and benchmarking strategies and tools allows SCT to evaluate opportunities for improving collaboration across facilities and the strength of centralized management and continuous improvement processes. Automation investments require some level of centralized strategy to leverage the investments, and this evaluation will feed later into the organization impact assessment which is intended to describe needed investments to drive consistency and communication across operations.
SCT Advisory specializes in conducting comprehensive end-to-end supply chain assessments that uncover hidden inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and untapped opportunities across supply chain planning, order management, logistics and warehousing. We go beyond surface-level diagnostics to evaluate how well your processes, technologies, and organization align with your strategic goals and customer expectations.
In this exercise, we’ll evaluate opportunities to streamline operations to better feed, manage, or maintain automated operations from a cross-functional perspective, and pair that perspective with specific and pragmatic options for the introduction of automation into the network segments that have been identified, considering speed, complexity, and cost. Finally, we’ll consider organizational capabilities and sourcing strategies (in house vs outsourced) across IT services, monitoring, and maintenance that reinforces potential challenges in the long term viability of automation investments, setting the stage for deeper strategic development of the relationships and skills needed for an optimal automation strategy.
SCT will prepare a high level architecture assessment focused on warehousing and automation. Scaling up automation investments warrants an intense focus on repeatability and reliability, and the architecture assessment will consider everything in the ecosystem that assures these can be delivered cost-effectively, including:
- Connectivity, data mapping tools, and integration monitoring tools.
- Task generation and orchestration of priority tasks in efficient assignments across manual and automated functions (including considerations for inventory availability and capacity constraints that could result in congestion on warehouse floors or conveyance).
- Equipment and automation status monitoring, alerting, and insights into root cause analysis and prevention.
- Maintenance management systems that plan spare parts inventories and work order scheduling.
- Instrumentation for monitoring equipment wear and tear, and the tools available for leveraging data for prescriptive maintenance recommendations.
A critical consideration that can save millions of dollars annually, maintenance planning is often deferred until vendors are selected and their recommendations become the de facto answer – but these recommendations streamline purchasing to the OEM (at a premium), and the OEMs have little incentive to right-size the purchasing and maintenance plans – outages may well result in additional buying suggestions, but true calibration of maintenance needs is seldom part of their strategy. Insourcing responsibilities for monitoring the performance of maintenance practices ensures someone internally is looking out to prevent downtimes and manage costs, but also come with their own set of complexities (locally vs centrally) in an area where skilled labor often requires advanced training. Third party distributors can be leveraged, and services providers including the OEMs can supplement in house capabilities.
SCT develops a set of recommendations to be considered as automation investments are evaluated to ensure the full scope and impacts of automation programs are being developed – the long term impact is that the foundational infrastructure required to optimize these investments in automation will be established up front, resulting in greater ROI over the program lifecycle.
Phase 4 – Findings and Recommendations
Once the team has vetted the comprehensive list of automation opportunities and supporting infrastructure, we will collect a final recommendation for implementation sequencing, vendor engagement strategies, and compile the information for executive consumption
Aggregating inputs across workstreams, we’ll sequence initiatives (supporting infrastructure as well as automation installations) with associated schedule requirements and budgetary/ROI estimates (hard and soft savings associated with those projects).
With clarity on roadmap priorities and tools, strategic relationship objectives can be solidified, allowing the broader ecosystem requirements to take shape. Governance processes in support of strategic relationships will be joined by sourcing and vendor strategies for adjacent investments and support areas. These may include direct engagements with preferred partners, RFIs to be leveraged as educational processes for areas that may require deeper design understanding, or RFPs to streamline and accelerate urgent initiatives, or where the provider landscape is more mature and requirements understood.
Based on results of the phased activities, we will deliver an executive readout of findings and recommendations, including:
- Recommended automation initiatives, high level cost and complexity, and justification
- Critical insights for the management of the automation installations and the maintenance of the equipment over the longer term.
- Consolidated, program level roadmap, budgetary and ROI expectations.
- Roadmap Implementation Plan and Proposal – Lays out the next phase(s) of the program to pursue.
