Lucas Systems
Assembly Line
📦 Machine Learning Makes Warehouse Product Slotting a Sure Bet
In warehouses that process a complex product mix, the placement of arriving inventory is fast and furious. When a truck unloads its shipment at the dock door, there’s little time to identify the perfect location to store everything in the load.
Until now, the solution to this challenge has been found in a mix of pre-planned slot locations for items that have predictable long-term distribution patterns, and more random placement of other inventory, which typically accounts for 70% — or more — of a facility’s capacity. When it’s time to pick products from those slots, data is processed to make the best of a sub-optimal storage situation.
Warehouse labor and/or robots are deployed to pick products as efficiently as possible, but this requires complex movements and sometimes-lengthy travel routes to assemble outbound shipments. Managers watch slotting inefficiencies grow over a period of months. Only when performance starts to significantly decline is it worth requesting a plan to overhaul a facility’s slotting system — a task that often needs to be outsourced to sophisticated and costly consultants. Once a new plan is finally implemented, market and other changes quickly start to degrade its effect.
Systems powered by machine learning (ML) now can make slotting changes feasible to accomplish on a daily basis. For the first time, warehouse managers can make continuous slotting improvements that cut labor costs, boost throughput, and open new opportunities to meet customer demands. Warehouses that fail to adapt risk losing their competitive advantage. ML-driven slotting systems available today can increase throughput 20–40% by recommending the best inventory locations based on SKU velocity, SKU affinity, product/slot information, pick paths, and other data.
New AI-powered dynamic slotting simplifies warehouse reslotting with click of a button
Distribution center technology provider, Lucas Systems, announced its next generation of Dynamic Slotting, a warehouse game changer for providing in-the-moment reslotting decisions, thanks to the powerful use of AI. Lucas Systems’ software will intelligently sift through an abundance of warehouse data to serve up optimal slotting recommendations. The results take minutes to generate, whereas traditional slotting analysis often takes months to complete using engineering resources or consultants.
Dynamic Slotting’s recommendations identify product moves that offer the biggest potential payback. Hundreds of parameters are taken into account including demand seasonality, item size, SKU velocity and costs. Its similarity detection prevents placing related items side by side to reduce picking errors. Lucas Systems’ Dynamic Slotting promises 20-40% increase in throughput because it recommends best locations for inventory based on SKU velocity, SKU affinity, product/slot information, pick paths and other data.