Will it be all virtual reality and robots or perhaps something a little more pragmatic?

You might have seen the speculative and imaginary video of pickers with augmented reality glasses viewing all kinds of images superimposed over the actual warehouse. Or even the video of a warehouse with the lights out and not a person to be seen, but continuing to operate by robots.

While these visions of the future entertain and intrigue us, they rarely are the best solution to today’s warehouse technology problems. While we are in a period of technological change in the warehouse, the transformation we will soon see works within the existing processes rather than replaces them. The next major advancement in the warehouse will be a combination of old, new and refactored technologies that will add huge benefits to efficiency, usability and accuracy.

In this white paper, we provide guidance on multimodal warehousing and multimodal cobots. Unlike virtual reality, self-managed robots and other aspirational visions you hear about, these two examples of multimodal order picking and cobot-enabled solutions are not imaginary. Distributors need pragmatic solutions that can adapt to seasonal requirements and condense the number of steps it takes to execute a process in order to prevent errors, wasted time and resources.

Tecsys offers these kinds of flexible and adaptive systems today — and at a fraction of the price of automated storage and retrieval (ASRs), AutoStore, specialized voice- or video-based picking systems. We designed our warehouse management software so it is scalable and adaptable to help you adjust your operations as your needs change. This simple and highly flexible approach to order picking is the real future of modern warehouse technology.