Sep 13, 2022

Demand for higher levels of service are forcing warehouse environments to evolve rapidly. As consumer demands and the e-commerce boom continue to transform operations, more businesses are deciding to modernize warehouses to meet demand surges. A more scalable warehouse can efficiently react to rising consumer expectations and complete more orders without overwhelming an already strained workforce. Indeed, studies show that 77% of warehouse decision makers agree they need to modernize their warehouse operations, but admit they are slow to implement new devices and technology. To provide a clear path towards effective modernization, tech giant, Zebra Technologies, developed a concise 5-tiered maturity model. Equipped with a modernization roadmap, decision makers can project growth while automating operations at their own pace with adaptable solutions that fit budgetary constraints.

By taking a scalable approach to modernization, warehouses can hope to prepare operations for more high-level implementations such as predictive analytics and robotics. These future-forward integrations can set businesses ahead of demand and competition, which is why solution designers must take careful note on how to grow warehouse maturity intelligently.

Understanding the Phases

Taking a leveled approach to increasing operational visibility allows you to migrate, upgrade, and innovate at your own pace without disrupting operations. As your committed solution provider, Heartland partners with Zebra Technologies to help you reach predictive and adaptive operations by navigating proactively through the model’s phases.

• Phase 1 is characterized by a lack or a complete absence of digitization. Facilities in this phase may be struggling to accurately determine stock levels, evaluate demands, and connect workers to timely data.

How to progress: To grow out of phase 1, warehouses must begin to assess their workflows to pinpoint bottlenecks in need of automation. For example, slow picking routes may benefit from a handheld scanner that communicates with the WMS. When making the transition from paper to digital, simplicity is key, which is why Android remains as your top option when looking for an enterprise OS for your system.

• Phase 2 focuses on trying to optimize the use of basic mobile devices and build on the initial digitization stage that is setup in Phase 1. A facility in this phase may struggle to connect workers and struggle to establish a unified flow of productivity through operations.

How to Progress: Evolving past phase 2 requires facilities to upgrade mobility solutions to achieve transactional mobility data plus workflow insights and more aggressive data capture. This enhances greater team productivity and workflow conformity.

• Phase 3 is when businesses fall into the inability to integrate real-time visibility that can prevent errors. Facilities in this stage have control of their operations, but do not take enough action to integrate greater asset visibility and utilization to increase compliance and reduce delays.

How to Progress: Businesses should work to target automated data capture and analyze real-time data from functional areas to start to learn more about how you can reduce errors. This may require facilities to map out bottlenecks within their operations to get a complete view of optimization areas.

• Phase 4 grounds facilities with the ability to reduce delays; however, collected data has yet to provide a clear picture of future patterns. Nevertheless, facilities in this phase should experience greater ease in locating inventory and maintaining manageable stock levels. Deployed locationing and data capture technologies create the necessary foundation for proactive actionable insights.

How to Progress: Warehouses in this phase should look to implement broad, location-aware data capture throughout operations to meet needs. This helps analyze, optimize, and sequence contextual data and business rules to enable automated alerts, and it gives your workers the information they need to take best-next-move guidance and improved decision-making. An example of this is that businesses may benefit from using RFID technology like the FX9600 and rugged scanners to get faster and more efficient visibility in your warehouse.

• Phase 5 is for when businesses can make the right decisions and analyze data, but fail to anticipate and adapt to business demands in real time. Facilities in phase 5 should be able to convert collected data from several streams to develop predictive insights into demand influxes, device utilization, and employee performance. Pervasive data capture with intelligent interfaces can help establish wall-to-wall data availability that enables machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. As a result, your business establishes proactive performance improvements to efficiently predict and adapt to the ever-changing supply chain and customer needs.

Achieving adaptive and predictive operations in phase 5 of the Warehouse Maturity Model starts with optimizing mobility and enhancing visibility. Contact us today to see how you can overcome disruptions in your warehouse.