How Simple, Affordable Conveyors Can Speed Up Your Fulfillment Process

In today’s e-commerce environment, speed in order fulfillment is expected. So, in order to meet fast turnaround times and maintain customer satisfaction, every step in your warehouse operations must be as efficient as possible.

Picture this, an e-commerce order comes in. A warehouse worker picks the items from your inventory, walks across the warehouse to the packing station, packs the items, carries the final box to your shipping station, and then to the dock. It may seem simple, but all that walking around adds up to significant time, is not scalable, and in some ways adds potential risk of ergonomic issues.

Therefore, to keep up with growing demand, your warehouse layout and material handling processes must work together to reduce steps and maximize throughput. Making changes here even as simple as incorporating a few sections of gravity conveyor can make a noticeable difference in your KPI’s.

One of our customers has a parts department for truck parts and needed to address this issue of time-consuming hand carrying throughout their facility. Specifically, their e-commerce business for their truck was experiencing slowdowns in their order fulfillment workflow. Manual processes often meant that more steps than necessary were needed to fulfill orders. After picking parts from their shelves, workers then would have to walk to a separate workstation to package the order and then again would have to carry these packed boxes to the shipping area to drop off these completed orders. This laborious flow resulted in unnecessary steps, adding time to this process.

Recognizing the need for a more efficient approach, our automation team helped streamline this process without breaking the bank and with minimal lead-times. By reducing the number of steps taken in this process and consolidating the packaging area closer to the picking area, we helped avoid bottlenecks, create adequate buffers, and accelerated their order turnaround time.

After assessing this warehouse space, we were able to advise that this dealership integrate several sections of gravity conveyor into their process. Positioned next to a packing station, a long-lasting and high-quality Daifuku gravity conveyor was the perfect fit for this e-commerce process.

Now, workers can pick items and bring them to the shipping station workbench. Once the item is packaged, instead of walking this completed order over to the shipping area, the worker just needs to place the package on this solution and it gently rolls down to the shipping area. This light automation setup reduces the amount of walking while carrying around the facility and improves workflow.

Packaging conveyor solutions are an efficient way to get boxes out of the door quickly. This conveyor produces a steady rate of output, maintaining the same level of speed and accuracy.

These packaging conveyors can also increase safety in your warehouse. When your processes rely on workers to transport packaged items to their next destination, this could result in injuries from carrying heavy or bulk loads.

Let’s get started!

Are your workers taking too many steps a day due to a lengthy process? Consider how an automation solution can streamline your daily operations, saving your workers steps and optimizing your time. Our material handling team is ready to help you design a solution that will streamline your operations. With installation and pre-assembly, we’ll make the process stress-free. Reach out to us here or give us a call at 833-754-2164 to get started!