Four Initiatives to Standardize Warehouses to Increase Digitalization and Automation

Warehouses see an increased need to become more and more digitalized and automated. This paper will look at a 3PL company operating warehouses worldwide with all types of customers. With the increased need for warehouse space, it becomes essential to standardize and automate warehouse operations. This paper will present several initiatives to standardize and digitalize warehouses to prepare them for automation. The four standardization initiatives that are investigated and presented for the case company are: Streamlined process flows based on offered services, automated put-away, automated setup of new clients based on predefined options with a configurator, and an automation framework to standardize the requirements for implementation of automation. Each initiative was developed and presented to different stakeholders at the warehouses. The stakeholders showed interest in the initiatives and especially the streamlined process flows, and the configurator will be implemented. It became clear that the biggest challenge will be implementing the suggested solutions on a big scale in multiple warehouses. However, this is also where the most significant benefits are as the benefits of running multiple warehouses can be archived.