Drone inventory
In the distribution center
Air drone technology is used in various sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, transportation, infrastructure, entertainment and telecommunications. One of the main advantages of using drones for internal audit is the speed of conducting the audit and the ability to ensure the safety of personnel with their help.
The use of drones indoors to collect visual data eliminates the need for employees to do this work themselves, which means they have the opportunity to devote potentially spent time to other tasks and do not have to put their health at risk trying to audit on high racks.
METRO warehouse inventory technology
This is an extremely important, but at the same time a routine process, associated with great risks for labor protection: employees have to work at height using safety belts, which increases the likelihood of an accident. According to the Industrial Rope Access Trade Association (IRATA), from 2017 to 2019, there were 4 industrial mountaineering employee deaths just in the US, and a total of 73 reported injuries. Therefore, METRO uses drones for this work.
How did we come to the decision to use drones?
The technologies of the selected contractor made it possible to automate and secure the inventory process using smart drones of their own production. Launch of this solution proved its effectiveness at the METRO site in Noginsk.
Boris Timofeev, head of the distribution center, talks about the innovation:
“We have been looking at this solution for a long time. We decided to try it when we realized that this is not only new cool device, but also something that can ensure a certain result: a drone, instead of a person, can fly over and scan all the barcodes, and then generate a file that can be uploaded to the system to compare the actual result with the one available in the system.
The agency provided a turnkey solution: it brought drones, trained operators and connected a program for transferring data to the METRO system.
This solution simplified the time-consuming inventory process as much as possible, made it safe and effective. For example, with the help of 4 drones, it was possible to inventory a warehouse of 12,000 pallet places in just 8 hours.
