When what is the most important thing for a warehouse is asked, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is inventory layout. The complexity of warehouses, the ever-changing inventory and seasonality of products are the ones that make slotting difficult and vital to efficiency. In its broadest sense, slotting in a warehouse is the process of categorizing and organizing inventory across the warehouse to maximize space and efficiency. In other words, slotting is a form of inventory management.
Why is the Slotting Crucial for Warehouses?
When slotting is done correctly, it provides benefits and profits to the company. With slotting, faster picking and fewer picking errors are made, more storage capacity is achieved, and labor costs are reduced.
However, traditional slotting methods require extensive engineering or consulting. The measurement, data collection and analysis processes required for correct slotting are done manually and take a long time. Moreover, every time the layout is broken, the same operations are repeated. Therefore, high costs are inevitable. However, artificial intelligence can help you a lot in this regard.
What is Dynamic Slotting?
What is required to have all these benefits mentioned above is dynamic slotting. Dynamic slotting, unlike traditional slotting, is a system that allows the positions of inventories in the warehouse to change. Especially with the development of e-commerce, the rapid change of the best-selling products has increased the necessity of dynamic slotting in warehouses.
Dynamic slotting uses artificial intelligence. AI eliminates much of the engineering and manual warehouse mapping and data entry required for traditional slotting systems. Based on activity-level data captured in warehouses, AI-based software can learn the spatial characteristics and travel time estimates required for a slotting model. And the learned model will adapt as conditions change and provide continuous optimization. It is also very cost effective compared to traditional methods.
Traditional slotting can use the past data, but slotting with AI can use both past and forecast data. Because it uses both data, your efficiency will be higher than traditional slotting.
If you want to learn more about slotting with AI, click here. And also if you want to improve your warehouses efficiency, dynamic slotting is one of the ways. The best way to improve efficiency is to use AI and machine learning in every part of your warehouse. In this blog post you can learn the other ways to improve your efficiency.