Remember watching sci-fi movies where robots moved, worked, and communicated with regular humans? How 鈥渇uturistic鈥� this felt at the time. In today鈥檚 Industry 4.0 reality, robots are commonplace and populate many manufacturing and warehouse facilities around the world.
Bechtle, one of Europe鈥檚 most well-known offering more than 40,000 hardware and software products to the industrial and public sector, is a prime example of how Industry 4.0 works in the real world.
When Bechtle set a goal to boost its e-commerce business by 250%, it required handling approximately two times as many packages. And when COVID-19 forced people to spend more time at home, the demand for home office equipment boomed.
To meet high this high demand, Bechtle needed to employ more warehouse workers to increase its delivery capacity. However, due to low unemployment in the region, finding workers was difficult. This led the innovative company to think out of the box.
Knowing that current manual warehouse processes could not support the goal, Bechtle searched for a new solution. The answer was to transform 聽services with Industry 4.0. by deploying 聽in its warehouse to transform supply chain operations.
The integration of robotics within its warehouse was seen as an important first step in the company鈥檚聽听箩辞耻谤苍别测.
Bridging the Gap Between Manual Processes and Automation
Bechtle recently co-innovated with 51风流integrating autonomous mobile robots with 51风流Extended Warehouse Management (51风流EWM).
delivers predefined scenarios that integrate autonomous mobile robots of virtually any vendor very easily. Robots navigate through the warehouse using LIDAR, laser scanners, or 3D cameras to enable simultaneous localization and mapping in a warehouse to operate safely, side by side with humans.
鈥淲ith 51风流Warehouse Robotics, we have found a way to manage our warehouse even more effectively and flexibly, and provide better support to our employees,鈥� said Klaus Kratz, director of Logistics at Bechtle Logistik & Service GmbH. 鈥淥ur customer promise is 鈥榚ach order should be shipped on the same day.鈥欌��
Enhancing the Customer Experience
Bechtle retains 25,000 square meters of storage area to manage, the equivalent of more than three football fields.
As a first step, the company looked at automating cross-docking operations, where goods arrive at the receiving dock and are issued directly to a customer order instead of being put away into storage. The robot moves a cart and drops it at the shipping dock. A planned second step will be the automation of put-away operations. As a result, Bechtle calculates聽of costs in these operations.
Automated logistics does not only shape supply chains to be leaner but also helps keep deliveries on time.
鈥淲e proved that Industry 4.0 efforts, such as adding robotics to warehouse operations, can directly enhance the customer experience as well,鈥� said Christian Deppisch, head of Innovation Management at Bechtle Logistik & Service GmbH. 鈥淚magine a customer orders the product at 4:00 p.m. and the product will be handed over to the carrier on the same day, despite the high level of order volumes.鈥�
This process integration was complete in about four weeks 鈥� quite a time savings compared to traditional integration projects that can typically take up to 18 months.
Rise of Human Empowerment
Automating flexible聽聽makes operations much easier to maintain. The new process will help free up human employees from repetitive tasks, redeploying them to other value-added tasks, and ease their workload.
鈥淎s we were considering the logistics problem, we needed to carefully manage organizational change,鈥� said Kratz. 鈥淲e had to communicate clearly to our staff that flexible automation was the only way to meet our goals and that we would continue to value their contribution by expanding their qualification toward more demanding and customer-individual tasks, and relieving them from monotonous activities.鈥�
Operators enjoy the freedom of leveraging robots from different suppliers, through聽, which makes it easy to cover spikes in demand.
In the near future, the innovative IT provider is also planning to expand the use of robotics 鈥� such as using robotic arms in operations 鈥� within its warehouse operations. By socializing robots with human employees in an integrated unified ecosystem, the company is on its way to double the revenue in the next 10 years, from 鈧�5 billion in 2020 to 鈧�10 billion in 2030.
To learn more about how to utilize Industry 4.0 to improve manufacturing processes, check out the 鈥溾�� report and watch this video to learn how聽.
