How Smart Warehouse Orchestration Helps Sustainability Efforts

Businesses that focus on sustainability today increase customer loyalty, and help to create a brand that people are fond of and respect.

Sustainability efforts improve hiring practices because people want to work for a company that thinks about the future and the environment. To maximize sustainability and minimize environmental footprint inside a warehouse, everyone works in concert to get inventory shipped on time and in full, with no wasted movement.

In warehousing, the bigger and more complex the facility, the greater the carbon footprint. Warehouses generate much waste, from driving fork trucks the distance between Chicago and New York daily to wasting huge amounts of packaging materials, which are thrown into the trash bin when they could be recycled or re-used.

Beyond packaging and machine usage, environmental pollution occurs within a warehouse from heating, cooling and lighting equipment. Alternative lighting sources, natural light or timed lighting can help to lower energy usage in the warehouse.

To further improve sustainability in the warehouse and lower greenhouse gas emissions, businesses can use technology applications such as a warehouse management system (WMS), intelligent warehouse orchestrator and order-picking systems.

Here are six ways to lower your carbon footprint in the warehouse:

• Use a WMS to ensure that products flow through the warehouse in an efficient and cost-effective way. It enables the movement of orders, tracks and allocates inventory, manages locations, and plans the storage of goods. A WMS brings sustainable value to the operation by saving time, energy and resources, along with generating less waste.
• Add an intelligent warehouse orchestrator, which sits on top of the WMS and orchestrates movements throughout the building, taking into account such constraints as labor availability, space, time and cost. By itself, current WMS software is insufficient for optimizing sequenced workflows that are needed to balance available trailers, doors, staff, inventory and space to meeting requirements for on-time, in-full deliveries. A warehouse orchestration system understands the delivery expectations for all warehouses over various times, and is able to create the most efficient plan for all actors. It maximizes output and minimizes the carbon footprint, travel time and cost. The system also identifies inventory, capacity and shipping constraints that will cause future challenges. These constraints can then be dynamically scheduled around to ensure that when an inbound or outbound shipment arrives, the dock staff can act on it. This creates a much smoother yard experience outside the warehouse, with directed work avoiding the scenario of trucks idling, emitting CO2 into the environment, while waiting for workers to arrive to help load and unload.
• Make sure inventory is available when a shipment is loaded. There may be too many shipments and not enough docks. Trailers may sit in the dock because there isn’t the capacity to unload everything on the schedule. Or, a campus may have all the right inventory and capacity, but it’s in the wrong building, and transfer shipments are required. Traditional WMS implementations don’t have the analytics to orchestrate all decisions that need to be juggled. Trailers sitting at the dock door take up space that a waiting truck needs to unload its cargo.
• Remove paper-based and manual processes from warehouse operations to more digitized processes. Reducing paper, such as inventory spreadsheets, timecards and pick lists, optimizes labor, touches and inventory, driving efficiencies. It also saves trees. 
• Minimize transfer shipments. Moving inventory between warehouses and production locations wastes time, fuel, and resources. A warehouse orchestration system creates opportunities for sustainability savings by shipping items straight from the production line, or scheduling more cross-docks. This minimizes the movement of goods, cutting down on fuel and unnecessary labor resources.
• Minimize inventory by reviewing safety stock policies, which saves space in the warehouse. Many companies today keep extra inventory on hand because of shortages caused by the pandemic. But excess inventory takes up space, and a smaller warehouse makes for a smaller carbon footprint.

Keith Moore is chief product officer at AutoScheduler.AI.

Read more of SupplyChainBrain's 2022 Supply Chain ESG Guide here.