Overview

Material handling automation has been commonplace for decades in manufacturing, where material handling automation combined with robots push, pull, lift, store, and retrieve raw materials and finished products. Reducing labor has been the traditional justification for manufacturing automation. However, employing an automation solution to relieve human workers of repetitive, tedious, and dangerous tasks and repurposing them to more productive duties is now the industry standard. The bar is rising for forward-thinking manufacturers. It’s no longer enough to work smarter and harder through automation – quicker with precision, at scale, and on-demand around the clock is the new profit-making height to reach. Retaining and repurposing skilled operators with years of experience and institutional memory and recruiting new talent in this challenging era of labor scarcity demands new ideas and experienced materials handling support providers. Warehouses buried in increasing stock-keeping units (SKUs) need a way to maximize floor space and maintain easy inventory access. Highly configurable AS/RS technology optimizes storage space, reduces picking time, minimizes manual processes, and allows greater inventory control. AS/RS base models support different load sizes, maximum heights, and load types, including shuttle-based storage AS/RS, which are ideal for storing, sorting, and retrieving goods to speed up fulfillment for high-throughput applications with lower SKU counts. Recently, a leading global manufacturer of food and beverage packaging with several locations throughout North America turned to Murata Machinery USA (Muratec) for help in meeting the challenge of its significant and steadily growing production volumes amid a shrinking skilled labor pool.