WalMart\'s plans to use drones in its warehouses to count inventory. A drone can
ID: 362105 • Letter: W
Question
WalMart's plans to use drones in its warehouses to count inventory. A drone can be moved up and down an aisle packed nearly to the ceiling with boxes, taking dozens of images per second to track inventory. These drones accomplish in as little as a day what took WalMart employees about a month. Amazon's initiatives in warehouse automation from robots to flying warehouse for drone delivery, which effectively puts WalMart and other competitors on notice. 1. Why are the drones a potentially important inventory management tool in warehouses? 2. What is Amazon doing to automate its warehouses? 3. Do these initiatives meaningfully improve delivery time and service experience of Amazon's customers or will these be just pipe dreams?Explanation / Answer
Q1) Drones are potentially important inventory management tool because:
> They save a lot of time. We can track our inventories faster and plan our orders accordingly.
> Since we can check our inventory almost every day, we can order frequently and maintain just optimal quantity .This reduces inventory carrying cost
> Reduces manpower requirement. Thus it reduces the manpower cost to the company
> It eliminates human errors. The data accuracy increases significantly.
Q2) What is Amazon doing to automate its warehouses?
Amazon has introduced robots in its warehouses to automate. There are around 100000 robots together in all the Amazon warehouses in the world. Amazon is in the plan of introducing more robots to the existing ones
Q3)
These initiatives have decreased the time spent to search a product in the warehouse. An Amazon employee might have taken few hours more to find a product than the robot. There are other factors too which influence the service experience and delivery time. Delivery time depends a lot on logistics. All the orders of the day are processed at once at a particular time of the day. Though robot searches a product faster, it has to wait to get the order processed. Therefore, automation doesn't have significant impact on delivery time and service experience. Automation is more helpful for warehouse management and cutting costs incurred in warehouse management.
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