Anyone who has tried to renovate a kitchen knows the challenge of improving something essential without completely losing the ability to use it. For warehouse operators, the principle is similar, but the stakes are much higher. As intralogistics operations grow, the challenge is often not whether to add more automation, but how to do it without bringing the whole site to a halt. Here, Mark Richards, UK sales manager at Beckhoff Automation UK, explains how intralogistics operations can scale in phases, rather than rebuilding everything from scratch.
In intralogistics, growth rarely happens on a blank sheet of paper. More often, operators need to add conveyor sections, sortation functions, picking zones or handling equipment around systems that are already running every day. That makes scaling a control challenge as much as a mechanical one.
Brownfield sites are rarely tidy. Existing equipment may come from different generations and different suppliers, with interfaces that have evolved over time. Documentation may be incomplete, while a change in one area can have unexpected effects elsewhere. The question is not simply whether to add more automation, but how to integrate it without creating unnecessary risk. For warehouse operators, the challenge is how to increase throughput and flexibility without stopping the operation that already exists.
Planning phased growth
Legacy infrastructure can make new technology difficult to implement cost-effectively, especially without significant downtime to existing manufacturing schedules. This problem is widespread in manufacturing, but the principle applies just as strongly in warehousing, where downtime quickly affects throughput, service levels and customer expectations.
Rather than treating expansion as one large cutover, operators can reduce risk by dividing projects into manageable phases. A new conveyor zone, picking cell or interface can be integrated, tested and commissioned while the rest of the site continues to run. This makes problems easier to isolate and avoids turning the whole upgrade into a single high-pressure event.
For that approach to work, planning is critical. Clear interfaces need to be defined between old and new systems. Operators need to know which controller owns which part of the process, what data needs to pass between systems and what should happen if communication is lost. Without that clarity, issues tend to appear when downtime is least acceptable.
Testing is just as important. In a live warehouse, new sections need to be tested thoroughly before they are brought into service, particularly where old and new systems have to exchange data. Phased cutovers should also include a practical fallback plan if something does not behave as expected.
This is also where PC-based control and distributed control architectures can help. PC-based control provides a flexible platform for integrating logic, motion, visualisation and communication. PC-based control can help because it is modular and adaptable. You can add functions, interfaces or control tasks more incrementally, instead of treating the whole system like one fixed block that has to be replaced all at once.
A distributed architecture, meanwhile, makes it easier to deploy control across different parts of the site, so new automation can be added and commissioned locally rather than forcing a full redesign of the wider system. Combined with open interfaces, that creates a more practical route to incremental expansion.
Continued expansion
The latest report produced by Savills for the UK Warehousing Association (UKWA) shows that the sector has grown by 61 per cent since 2015 and now stands at approaching 700 million sq ft. Development of warehouses over 1m sq ft has increased by 345 per cent in the last decade.
However, as was highlighted by Clare Bottle, the chief executive of UKWA, “there is an acute shortage of both high-quality buildings and potential development land.” Furthermore, JLL reports that 61 per cent of Europe’s warehouse stock is more than ten years old, underlining the need to modernise existing assets rather than assume every improvement will come through new-build facilities alone.
For intralogistics operators, then, scaling is not really about starting again. It is about adding automation in a controlled, practical way within the reality of a live site. Much like a kitchen renovation, you cannot always tear everything out at once. PC based control and open architectures can help by facilitating a more incremental, staged approach, helping keep a live site operating while planned automation upgrades take place.
To discover more about Beckhoff’s latest projects for the intralogistics industry, you can read the latest case study with Ocado in PC Control magazine.
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