With real estate shortages and rising rental rates, warehouse and fulfillment managers are trying to get the most out of the space they currently have instead of moving into new locations. At the same time, order volumes are increasing, especially during peak season, and SKU proliferation is high, causing the facilities to run out of room for product storage on their main floor. Instead of moving to a larger warehouse and paying for new space, businesses can move up instead of out by expanding their operations vertically with mezzanines and multi-level picking structures, known as pick towers.
The Benefits of Mezzanines and Pick Towers
When you’re looking to optimize your warehouse space, you may consider investing in a highly automated system for your warehouse floor. Mezzanines and pick towers can be a great approach because they are less costly and less complex to operate than an automated fixed system.
Adding a mezzanine or pick towers offers multiple benefits to your facility:
- Create usable warehouse space faster and at a lower cost than building modifications
- Avoid the cost and disruption of moving your warehouse premises
- Achieve flexible integration with other machinery or systems
- Improve your warehouse’s storage capacity and significantly boost productivity when you have the right automation in place like autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)
- Optimize the payback on your existing facility by utilizing more of its volume
- Enhance efficiency and quality through space creation and improved workflow
Double Your Storage Density
When you install these multi-level picking structures, you improve the ratio of available storage space to your total warehouse space, known as storage density. Mezzanines, in the form of partial additional floors above your existing warehouse space, instantly multiply available floor space within the same footprint. Pick towers (sometimes called “pick mods”) expand your warehouse space vertically even further with multiple levels of shelving and picking stations stacked above each other.
Increase Order Processing Capacity
Along with storage space improvements, you can significantly improve order cycle times and throughput by picking with human associates and AMRs working together on multiple mezzanine or pick tower levels.
Businesses should equip their warehouses with solutions that power efficient and coordinated, multi-floor operations with in-level task/pick clustering and directed pick-and-pass across multiple levels. When picks are complete on one level, AMRs should travel to a pick-and-pass station to drop off work that needs to be transported to a new level for the next task, or to the ground floor for sortation and pack-out.
To help AMRs and associates follow the most efficient order picking sequences, innovative pick-and-pass feature clusters should direct order fulfillment across all levels of your warehouse. AI-powered solutions can allow for the overlay of bots across multiple levels and workflows, while the advanced AI-driven analytics reporting dashboards allow in-depth visibility across all mezzanine levels, helping you to actively monitor productivity rates and workflows – in real-time – from anywhere at any time – and on any device.
Avoid Bottlenecks with an End-to-End Automated Picking Solution
To fully realize the improved warehouse throughput of mezzanines and pick towers, and not wind up with a bunch of orders clogging up packing stations, you need automated downstream sortation. Multi-level picking results in a concentrated stream of fulfilled orders, which could create congestion.
Integrated picking and sorting solutions are a perfect fit for sites that batch pick significant volumes of orders on mezzanines and pick towers. AMRs should work seamlessly to batch pick in mezzanine environments and scale up and down flexibly as your site grows and expands. The batch picked items are delivered to a manual sortation station or an automated put wall. This integrated solution can reduce fulfillment cost per unit by up to 40% and reduce space required for consolidation by 70-80%.
While these structures work well to increase your storage space, and ramp up your productivity when automated, not all forms of automation work on mezzanines – but robots do it with ease. There are four top reasons why you should consider automating your mezzanines and pick towers with robots as your next move.
1. Improve Warehouse Efficiency with Mezzanine
Robots on a mezzanine give you valuable square footage to augment your main warehouse floor, but these spaces often get used simply for low-value overflow storage. That’s just a waste when they’re prime space for even more picking density. By automating your mezzanine processes, you transform this bonus overhead real estate into another way to fulfill more orders.
AMRs excel at navigating tight spaces and narrow aisles and transport goods to a pick-and-pass station. Once the items are at the station, they’ll be transported down to a new level for the next part of the task, be it adding more items to the order or getting the item to packing and shipping.
2. Reduce Errors and Bottlenecks
Ensuring accurate orders is tougher when working across multiple floors that aren’t automated. This is especially true if you’re just utilizing pen and paper to keep track, or your floors don’t “talk” to each other. Without automation, your associates must manually move items between floors, which is time-consuming and can lead to mistakes. Inaccurate inventory counts on any floor create downstream issues like short picks, which will frustrate customers.
Warehouse automation and AMRs help you to bypass these issues with real-time scanning and inventory integration. They autonomously transport goods throughout each level of your warehouse while displaying the exact item and location (sometimes even with a picture) for your associates to pick the correct item. This digital chain of custody visibility reduces miscounts and inaccurate picks that create bottlenecks. AMRs also free your associates from tedious transport duties so they can handle more value-added tasks.
3. Lower Safety Risk
Using mezzanines poses inherent safety challenges such as climbing stairs or lifts while carrying heavy loads raises injury risks for your associates. Automation through AMRs provides a safer alternative for mezzanine material transport, with robots handling the heavy lifting and carrying, minimizing the need for human intervention.
4. Scale Your Operations with Ease
Warehouse mezzanines provide vital space to accommodate surge volumes driven by seasonal peaks, promotions, or social media-driven purchases. Automation in the form of AMRs combined with human associates provides the perfect way to scale your entire warehouse, including your mezzanine. With AMRs that are offered through a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, you can expand or contract your fleet dynamically based on order volumes and deploy more bots to handle peak seasons. In addition, the RaaS model enables operators to get a very fast ROI in just weeks vs. other systems that may take years to provide a viable ROI.
Embracing robotic warehouse automation, and ‘going vertical’ using mezzanines is the fastest — and easiest — way to activate your warehouse’s full potential.
