Why Liquor Warehouses Are Turning to Drones for Inventory Control
Inventory accuracy is a key factor that determines our effectiveness and ability to serve our customers across our network, said Karli Sage, Vice President, Supply Chain Management, Technology and Engineering at Southern Glazer Wines and Spirits. Through that sentence we can understand why indoor drones have become popular in this sector of the logistics that many people do not appear to pay much attention to but where monstrous amounts of goods flow on a daily basis.
The fact that Southern Glazer has over 18 months scaled over 40 autonomous drones in nine distribution centers is an indication that warehouse aviation is leaving pilot programs and transitioning into regular infrastructure. The Corvus Robotics-built system flies within active facilities, scans reserve storage sites, and feeds the answers into the warehouse management system without causing regular floor traffic. Practically, the warehouse is not being replaced by the drones. They are substituting the clearest bit of being aware of what is actually in it.
The difference is significant to beverage distribution, where the high number of SKUs, quick order movement, and high pallet error costs can make a small mismatch costly in terms of late delivery. The drones according to the specifics of deployment have registered approximately 5,000 flights and have detected over 35,000 known discrepancies. It does not work only on cleaner data. The claimed better inventory accuracy at Southern Glazer resulted in a 100-basis-point rise in the number of cases per hour, which provided the technology a direct operational presence, as opposed to a back-office presence. The bigger shift is cadence.
Inventory that was previously counted quarterly is today being verified every two weeks in warehouses. The increased frequency modifies the appearance of problems within the building. Rather than diagnosing that a misplaced pallet has been shaken off, and being unable to recover it, teams can identify the problem sooner with high-resolution images, barcode scans, and time-stamped video that is attached to a particular location. The rollout information also states that each site is reclaiming about 60 to 70 labor hours per week that would have been used in counting by hand in the case of manual counting of the cycles.
The indoor inventory drones have been gathering up to this point over time. Previously systems were not able to meet the basic physics of warehouse flight: inadequate lighting, no GPS, high racks, narrow aisles and layouts which kept changing. More advanced platforms are currently based on a mixture of computer vision, AI, and onboard sensing as opposed to external navigation infrastructure. Corvus has characterized its platform as 24/7 with no operator support, whereas other operators have mentioned the same benefits. Stated differently, GEODIS when tested said that a drone could be used to scan 11,000 pallets in 6 hours, and this could be applied across numerous industries and distributors.
The notable thing about the deployment made by the Southern Glazer is the scale and continuity. Jackie Wu, the chief executive of Corvus Robotics, stated that the company has not been trying autonomous inventory, but has been adopting it as an infrastructure. That represents a significant indicator to the broader supply-chain industry, particularly in food and beverage production where reserve inventory preciseness, fill rates and throughput have close connections.
Not much more of the silent part. When drones manage to demonstrate that they can operate remotely, without disrupting the operation of the aisles or displacing teams due to their operations, they will begin to resemble not so much the experiment of robotics but the next staple warehouse item.
