Demanding e-Commerce fulfilment requires increasingly intelligent Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). Some vendors have introduced highly automated ‘goods-to-man’ stock movement solutions but these are capital intensive and capacity-constrained. Other vendors, including Synergy, offer more flexible ‘man-to-goods’ (MTG) methods with intelligent picking trolleys that are pushed to the stock locations. Although relatively inexpensive compared with automation, MTG solutions are demanding for pickers and staffing costs can rise dramatically at peak periods. A new approach to this problem is to retain high flexibility but minimise human effort without requiring expensive automated plant and equipment, the key being to coordinate movement of people and unpicked stock within the warehouse. A real time location system is proposed that will update precise 3D locations of the people and stock. New real-time routing and scheduling algorithms will identify the optimum routes for stock and people movement around the warehouse and schedule change along those routes, in real-time, to compensate for planned and unplanned events, e.g. delays within the Warehouse; new stock arrivals; new stock collection requests; predicted changes in stock collection patterns in response to expected changes in received stock requests. A key element of the proposed new system is dynamic relocation of unpicked stock within the warehouse to minimise the distance travelled for picking. This innovative WMS approach will: a) Significantly reduce the time taken to pick stock, enabling processing of more orders per day whilst optimising labour utilisation; b) Allow installation in any warehouse using any standard order/stock picking trollies and totes; c) Provide robotic levels of efficiency at a much reduced cost level. This 18-month project will deliver detailed evaluations of the functionality and performance capabilities based around three increasingly complete prototype demonstrators.

The Snapcontrol System project will demonstrate a new form of Warehouse Control System (WCS) designed to significantly improve the efficiency of stock/order picking within a warehouse. Stock/order picking from many product lines of varying physical size and weight is notoriously expensive and difficult to fully automate. Snapcontrol provides a first to market solution ideally suited to supporting ecommerce-based stock/order picking where any mistake in the completion of the picking can have significant adverse business consequences. The commercial aim is for a Snapcontrol solution to cost only 10% of that for a traditional WCS. The Snapcontrol solution uses standard off-the-shelf components to create a new flexible putto- light trolley and control system that enables warehouse staff to quickly and reliably identify, pick, confirm and complete multiple orders. The innovation activities are the new: a) Snapcontrol Tablet – to extend the capabilities of the WCS and the various types of stock machinery that can be deployed around a warehouse (using standard Android-tablets with Wifi/3G/4G networking) b) Trolley Routing Engine – to host the new routing algorithms within the Snapcontrol server that identify the optimised stock picking routes for multiple trollies, holding multiple totes (plastic bins), within a set of warehouses. Successful deployment of the Snapcontrol System will: a) Significantly reduce the time to pick stock and improve the accuracy of the picking. This will enable both the picking of more orders per day and reduce the number of staff required to pick the stock. The system can be installed in any warehouse and use any of the standard order/stock picking trollies and totes b) Enable a new range of warehouse support opportunities for companies who could not afford the capital investment traditionally associated with such a system. The ROI is based on costs of only a few tens of thousands of pounds as opposed to the more common few millions.