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

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 CO₂ emissions made by supply chains.

Technologies for reducing emissions and costs in combined heat and power production

“…And it would make a lot of sense in nowadays digitalization times to apply the enormous potential of AI platforms to this fleet to improve the design of these flue gas scrubber units in future, based on global level fleet data analysis [35] and by so doing enhancing both the circularity of these units and the on use time efficiency which deduces the environmental impact of the CHP energy factories, where these are implemented into. Also, there would be a good change now to build a selection framework for CHP energy faculties sustainability enhancement options, similarly to the path of studies done on logistics side [36,37,38], to help municipalities to focus their environmentally friendly investments on efficient directions.…”

A New Sustainable Warehouse Management Approach for Workforce and Activities Scheduling

“…Recently, more and more attention has also been paid to the ecological sustainability of warehouses. Warehouses are the most responsible for the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the supply chain [1], primarily due to the increase in energy consumption for lighting, heating, cooling, air conditioning, and the handling of goods [2]. In this regard, companies are being invested in to provide renewable energy sources, green technologies, recycling systems, and so on.…”

“…Nevertheless, economic, social, and environmental sustainability are equally important for achieving overall warehouse sustainability [2]. Tan et al [3] describe in detail their importance, and point out that any change in goals in one type affects the achievement of the goals of the other two types of sustainability.…”

State of the art preliminary literature review: Sustainability and waste reporting capabilities in management systems

“…Especially now, in Covid-19 pandemic time, when people stay away from physical shops and shop on-line instead, generating demand burst for warehousing, cross-docking, delivery center packets handling, and so on. A perfect setup to ask the question there is what sort of functions warehouse management systems have for sustainability matters reporting and how to decarbonize warehousing activities [35].…”