Three warehouses, 100,000 pallet locations, one recording unit.

Background

The customer is the world's largest contract logistics provider, and one of three of the top ten global providers running Sentispec Inventory across many locations. The cluster in this study exists to serve a single end customer: one of the world's premier pharmaceutical companies, whose stock is high value, tightly regulated and audited on a schedule nobody moves.

Three warehouses, 100,000 pallet locations between them, sitting close enough to be worked as one operation. That is the shape most contract logistics networks are actually in, and it is the shape a vendor selling one autonomous vehicle per building prices badly.

The challenge

• The audit was the cost, not the count. Pharma stock is audited to a standard, and meeting that standard by hand meant people, hours and a paper trail assembled after the fact.
• Three sites meant three of everything. Every counting method the operator had priced put fixed equipment or an autonomous vehicle into each building, so the cost scaled with buildings rather than with pallets.
• A contract logistics provider carries its client's risk. An accuracy failure in a pharma warehouse is not an internal problem, it is a conversation with the client and, eventually, with their regulator.

What changed

One recording unit covers all three warehouses. It is picked up by a forklift that already works the site, driven down the aisles at normal travel speed, and moved to the next warehouse on a rota. Nothing is fitted to the vehicles and nothing changed in the racking at any of the three sites.

• Annual audit costs fell by 90%. The count that supports the audit is a drive, and the evidence is generated with it rather than assembled afterwards.
• The cluster broke even inside two months, against the same published setup and annual fee as any other site.
• Every discrepancy carries its own image. For a regulated end customer, an exception that can be opened and looked at is worth more than an exception that has to be argued.
• One unit, three buildings. The capital line that a robot or a drone per warehouse would have created never had to appear, because the camera is leased inside the annual fee.

Why a cluster changes the arithmetic

A contract logistics provider rarely runs one warehouse. It runs a campus, a region, or a set of sites dedicated to one client. Every autonomous counting product on the market is commissioned into a single building and stays there, so a three site operation buys or subscribes to three of them.

A recording unit is a piece of equipment a forklift can pick up, which means it can be somewhere else tomorrow. One unit covers up to five warehouses in a cluster. This customer runs three on one, and the Network pricing is built for exactly that shape.

See the ten published deployments and how break even was calculated