Defining warehousing
Explore the benefits of warehousing and the future of it
What is warehousing?
The term warehousing is used to describe the storage of goods. Such as raw materials, parts or finished products which will then be sold or distributed through an organisation.
The terms, warehouse, distribution centre and fulfilment centre are often used interchangeably and do have a lot in common. However, the differences can be seen below:
- A warehouse provides only storage and store management, often for an associated factory. It can be used to store anything including liquids, electronic piece parts, large items of capital plant, precious metals, gemstones, packaging, raw materials, and household items.
- A distribution centre provides storage but also offers value-added services. Such as completing customer orders and offers more comprehensive transport and distribution facilities. The orders tend to be business to business orders (B2B) often for retail outlets. Distribution centres can be seen as holding centres between the manufacturer and the retailer.
- A fulfilment centre is like a distribution centre but has developed much more recently from the growth in the online, e-commerce market. It is specifically geared to short term storage to satisfy business to consumer orders (B2C). It requires a very quick turnaround and to operate at this level of expertise, is often outsourced to a third party.
What benefits does effective warehousing bring to your business?
Other than storing goods, warehousing can bring many more benefits to your business. They are usually based on the outskirts of cities and are near good transport networks.
But what other benefits do they have?
Productivity
Warehousing enhances productivity and lowers costs for many businesses and organisations
Storage
Production support for storage of goods and raw materials
Expand
Opportunity to expand through the storage of goods and raw materials
Services
Inclusion of picking, packing, and shipping services
Stabilisation
Price stabilisation to meet supply and demand
Spot stacking
Enable ‘spot stacking’ of products for seasonal purchases
Safe storage
Minimises business risk through the safe storage of products
Electronic systems
A network of electronic systems to check, manage, count and control stock
Robots and cobots
Recently, warehousing can include robots or cobots, who will work collaboratively alongside humans.
The future of warehousing
The new decade will see a move within warehouse operations towards the increased adoption of collaborative robots (cobots). These will work alongside employees and assist with heavy lifting and many repetitive tasks. Cobots tasks can include unloading pallets and putting items to stock and quality inspection tasks that require the visual processing technology, with which many cobots are equipped with.
Whilst still in an early phase, cobots are becoming smaller and cheaper, making them an attractive investment. The benefits lie in the reduction of operating costs by using them for 24 hours working, increasing the speed of repetitive tasks, flexibility in deployment and releasing humas capital for high value tasks.
Recently, warehouses are becoming much more sustainable. Many warehouses produce not only enough energy to power its own production, but feeds back into the country’s general supply lines.
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