Processes Matter When It Comes to SLAM Design
SLAM design starts with smoothing your final 100 feet processes before adding automation, ensuring the investment delivers a real ROI.
By SLAM
Before investing in SLAM automation, take a good hard look at your materials flow. Here’s what to consider.
One of the most essential—and easiest—areas to automate your warehouse is the final 100 feet of operations. The scan, label, apply, manifest (SLAM) tasks can serve as low-hanging fruit for an automation investment. But like any other area of the warehouse, you must get your processes right to reap the benefits and achieve a return on investment (ROI) when investing in SLAM automation.
Put simply, not every place in the warehouse needs automation, and when your processes are not smooth to begin with, throwing technology at poor processes won’t solve anything. So before you act on SLAM automation, determine the right level of automation and ensure you have the necessary processes in place to justify your investment.
SLAM tackles specific processes in your final 100 feet, and your goal with automation should be to smooth those processes out and ensure they flow seamlessly. Eliminating unnecessary steps and creating a seamless SLAM operation is the goal.
You also need to focus on your order volume and specific requirements of your SLAM line. For instance, you should analyze your process flow from weight checking through the end of the line. This includes things like document insertion, labeling, sorting, and shipping. Assess whether tasks like adding dunnage, packing slip insertion, and specialized labeling should be automated. Do you have enough volume to justify the investment?
You must also consider your various shipping scenarios. These can include full pallets, LTL shipments, parcel shipments, polybagged orders and more. Your system design should be able to accommodate different carrier requirements and throughput rates.
Just as important as the hardware is the software that orchestrates the entire process, ensuring cartons are routed, labeled, validated, and manifested correctly.
Every company should consider key factors that help you justify a SLAM automation investment. These can include staffing levels, peak throughput rates, order volumes, and any quality issues that relate to dimensional weights. Your design should also accommodate future changes in carrier requirements, packaging formats, and order profiles without requiring a complete system redesign.
Companies must also take into account the various label types and application requirements, along with SLA requirements that might justify different system configurations. These can range from a single print and apply applicator to redundant systems with multiple print-and-apply machines. Your SLA requirements will ultimately determine the speed and configuration of the system needed to support your operation. For instance, if you’re required to process 60 cartons per minute, you may want to integrate three print and apply machines, round robin, inline and in motion. Or, if the process requirements are fewer, you may want to drop to two applicators and a conveyor.
Importantly, you don’t want to rely on a single applicator. Instead, build redundancy into your system. If you depend on one applicator and it breaks down, your operation can quickly back up, resulting in delayed shipments and unhappy customers. Along with redundancy, you should also design for scalability. For example, two inline packing lines can feed one print and apply system with dual applicators. On “normal” days you can operate with one employee at each line. During peak season, you can scale up to two people at each line to tackle the higher volume.
Because SLAM is at the end of the warehouse process, it’s also important to analyze whether automating the area with your existing upstream automation is feasible. The work that occurs before the SLAM line directly impacts how and whether you should design the system. SLAM doesn’t exist in a silo, and automating it without optimizing the processes that lead into that final 100 feet is simply asking for bottlenecks. For instance, if your picking processes require double-touching items and manually packing them into boxes before they move onto a conveyor, you’re adding an unnecessary step. This can be time consuming, costly, and slow the flow of materials before they reach an automated SLAM line. Instead, your process should allow associates to pick directly into shipping cartons before sending them to the SLAM line.
Within the SLAM line itself, you must carefully evaluate your processes before automating them. Anytime you have issues with the product shipping process, you should address them. A well-designed SLAM process should also validate that every shipment is complete and correct before it leaves the facility, reducing shipping errors, customer returns, and rework. Problems with cartonization and inventory management of shipping containers could lead to higher costs and product damage. Adding automation here won’t solve those problems—process improvement will.
Keep in mind that many operations look very similar. To get the most out of an automated SLAM line, you need to carefully evaluate your basic systems and ensure they are in place—along with the correct processes. This will help you maximize the value of your SLAM line.
Automated SLAM systems also provide valuable operational data, allowing managers to monitor throughput, identify bottlenecks, and continuously improve performance over time.
If you’re interested in learning more about SLAM automation and how it can work in your warehouse, visit the SLAM group’s page on the MHI website. While you’re there, you can also try MHI’s new 3-D warehouse visualization tool to help explore automation opportunities.
Source: Patrick Hanrahan, Numina
Reviewed by SLAM Marketing Committee
Industry Groups
- Scan, Label, Apply, Manifest
