Decarbonizing warehousing activities through digitalization and automatization with WMS integration for sustainability supporting operations

LUT University, School of Engineering Science, 53850, Lappeenranta Finland

^∗ Corresponding author: ari.happonen@lut.fi

Abstract

The current strong outsourcing trend dictates that the efficiency of outsourced warehousing is a big contributing impact factor for the carbon footprint from supply chains. A good warehouse management system boosts warehousing eco-friendliest by reducing space waste and unnecessary number of material movements, to ensure continuous fast materials flow and to keep the heating and cooling costs to a minimum. All this may happen on some lengths inside the traditional manual warehousing scenes, but in fact, if the highest level of efficiency is wanted/needed, the operator shall need to automate, digitalize and robotize their operations. Authors presents an example of automation in the warehousing context, where the warehouse operator is capable of turning around an order line as an outgoing packet, even in high peak load times under 3h time period. This sort of efficiency means less needed storage space as items stay less time in the warehouse and such automatization also gives the 3PLs possibility to store materials in high rising automated systems like automated storage and retrieval systems to optimize their space usage. All combined, the future warehouse operations can make a positive impact on efforts to reduce overall CO_₂ emissions made by supply chains.