What is One-Touch-Fulfilment?

Discover how the robotics revolution almost eliminates fulfilment errors

Manual error may be inevitable, but it is not unavoidable.

While warehouse experts disagree slightly, the average agreed levels of manual error is between 0.3% and 3% of all orders. While that might sound like a small amount, even with just an 0.3% error rate, every day that would mean:

• 83 botched NHS operations every day
• 350 planes landing in the wrong city worldwide
• More than 117,000 failed UK credit card transactions
• Over 8,000,000 emails in the wrong inbox

Even when error rates are as seemingly as low as 0.3%, it is clear why warehouses work to lower that number even further, given the costs involved:

• Customer service costs
• Reputational damage costs
• Re-shipping costs
• Returns processing costs
• Administration costs

In times past, these kinds of issues were simply written off as “the cost of doing business”. The causes were well understood. Long walks between bins lower staff concentration levels. Strains from longer shift patterns performing reparative tasks make it harder for staff to focus on the fine detail of every last individual transaction.

These used to be just facts of warehouse life. It was not seen as something that could be avoided, so it was just something to be dealt with.

The robotics revolution means that is no longer true. Flexible automation now presents warehouse businesses of all kinds with a new model that minimises manual interaction using a streamlined order process, to the point where the possibility of errors becomes essentially negligible.

One-Touch-Fulfilment

One-Touch-Fulfilment means exactly that. There is only one point during the fulfilment process where a manual operative is directly involved. That operative isn’t tired from walking up and down aisles of products and isn’t losing concentration due to the complexity of their lists and tasks.

Using the goods-to-person (G2P) model of flexible automation, the possibility for error is dramatically reduced. The process to make this happen works thusly:

• A robot is directed to the rack where the desired item is located.
• The robot then carries the rack to the staffed picking station.
• A pick-light identifies the item in question, allowing the picker to select it, and pack it.

By automatically pre-narrowing the field of items to pick from, the automated system has accomplished the vast majority of the work far ahead of time. With the operative’s task dramatically simplified, errors become much less likely.

The results speak for themselves. Testing has revealed that the G2P and the pick-light system is a more accurate and much faster picking model than paper-based picking, voice-based picking, or even barcode-scanner based picking.

With the costs of errors removed, and the item selection process dramatically streamlined, your staff can be more accurate than ever, and your business can progress and grow with confidence.

One-touch-fulfilment also dramatically reduces the overall costs of every last order your business processes. Every manual touch-point an item goes through before it is processed and shipped is one more set of staff-related expenses. The edge acquired by businesses using one-touch-fulfilment cannot be overstated. More manually focused businesses may well find themselves unable to complete.

One-touch-fulfilment is the robotics revolution in action. To see what this all means for yourself, come and witness it first hand. Visit Europe’s first flexible automation robotics demonstration centre, just north-west of the city of Lincoln, UK.

Discover how the robotics revolution offers your business a chance to move past old assumptions about how warehouses work. Move into a future where the only assumption is that every problem can be solved.