Production logistics: Automation’s next frontier

Movement of materials in an industrial facility, be it a factory, processing plant or warehouse, has traditionally relied on conveyors, forklifts driven by people and plenty of manual labor. But just as the efficiencies brought by automation have been the focus of manufacturing production operations for decades now, industry is now looking at how to apply increasing levels of automation to material handling to drive operating efficiencies end-to-end across a facility.

This focus on the automation of material handling is taking place because “material handling consumes about 25% of a workforce’s time, 55% of the space in a facility and 87% of production time,” said Greg Gernert, vice president and general manager of motion control business at Rockwell Automation, during his keynote presentation at the Motion Users Group meeting at Automation Fair 2024. These statistics show “why a focus on motion automation matters to help improve those numbers and drive efficiencies.”

Gernert added that Rockwell Automation’s vision is to help industry achieve “end-to-end autonomous material handling with centrally managed automated processes and data-driven insights to enable continuous optimization.”

But what does that look like?

The first step is to view intralogistics as part of the connected factory. Gernert noted that industry has been focusing on reducing islands of automation in production operations, but it's not just the individual automated devices and systems that require attention.

“It's also about how you connect the manufacturing floor to your warehouse, and your inbound materials handling to your storeroom, and your storeroom to the manufacturing line,” he said. Considering the amount of time and space that’s dedicated to material handling, “if we can reduce that by 10%, that's real money and real results that can be driven throughout your organization.”

Automated material handling’s effect on labor

Looking more specifically at how intralogistics automation can improve productivity, Gernert highlighted an example of the impact on the industrial workforce. The big issues here involve answering questions like: Do we have enough people? Are they doing the jobs that really create value for the organization? How do we improve their workflows to move from having a team bring materials to a production line to reallocating those individuals to higher value positions inside of the company?

Citing an example of Rockwell Automation technology deployment to address these questions for a Tier One automotive supplier, Gernert said this manufacturer had four manufacturing lines in its facility, but because of labor shortage issues, they were only able to staff three of those lines. But by repositioning the resources they had in the plant with the help of logistics automation tech, “they were able to immediately get a 25% increase in output by reallocating those individuals to that fourth line,” said Gernert. “That's the kind of result the automation of production logistics can bring.”

Rockwell Automation’s logistics tech stack

Explaining how production logistics technologies extend automation across every step of material movement, Gernert pointed to Rockwell Automation’s tech stack that enables automated production logistics and orchestrates operations and material movement together as one operation.

Key technologies here include:

• Autonomous materials movement using OTTO autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to improve material movement efficiency and reallocate the workforce formerly used to move materials.
• Connect islands of automation across production and logistics with Rockwell Automation’s Connected Enterprise approach.
• Direct material movement and traffic management using MES (manufacturing execution systems) and MOM (manufacturing operations management) software.
• Centralize data from devices and systems to gain visibility across a facility or multiple facilities to improve decision-making with data analytics. This includes data from MES, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and WMS (warehouse management systems) to drive end-to-end optimization, planning and change management.
• Simulation and emulation to de-risk deployment of intralogistics technologies and ensure the highest return on investment.

“The future of industrial operations centers on how we make these technologies work together—from intelligent devices to software,” said Gernert.

Further examples of automated logistics success

Beyond the Tier One automotive supplier example cited above, Gernert highlighted four other cases of Rockwell Automation’s logistics technology delivering results across industry:

• AMRs deployed to relieve skilled operators from material handling tasks at a Fortune 500 aerospace company, reducing manual labor required by 20% and saving the company $1.3 million.
• Created a virtual replica of an AMR system at a distribution center and used artificial intelligence (AI) for optimal routing of the AMRs, resulting in a 13% increase in throughput and saving the company $1 million in reduced hardware costs.
• Enabled performance insights into a consumer-packaged-goods automated warehouse system that saved 8-10 hours of labor a week per worker. The system providing these insights was scaled to more than 10 warehouses in 3 to 4 weeks.
• Built a digital twin to help a retailer rapidly design a fully automated material handling system resulting in a 25% reduction in operations’ downtime and provided a design for scaling the system across the retailer’s operations.

These applications all point to the increasingly automated and autonomous future of production logistics, Gernert said, adding a quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the subject: “Automation is just beginning, the future belongs to autonomous systems that can learn, adapt and make decisions on their own.”