Smart Unattended Warehouse | Digital Management Solution for Equipment Maintenance Spare Parts

The production lines in the manufacturing plants mostly operate in a continuous mode. Daily equipment maintenance and emergency repair of sudden failures all require sufficient spare parts as support. The dedicated maintenance spare parts warehouse stores pneumatic components, motor accessories, sealing consumables and other types of materials. Many workshops have nearly two hundred types of spare parts. During periods of concentrated equipment failures, the number of daily repair orders can reach ten to twenty. The demand for spare parts is scattered and the frequency of usage is high.

The traditional spare parts warehouse operates based on a mode involving paper-based document circulation, personnel on-site supervision around the clock, and regular manual inventory checks. This has long imposed additional procedural burdens on maintenance personnel and warehouse management staff, and is not conducive to the implementation of lean management in the workshop operation process. Currently, many manufacturing enterprises have established a standardized unmanned warehouse system. Inside the warehouse, open intelligent shelves are used to store various spare parts. Relying on a complete set of digital control software and hardware, they have integrated the entire process of online application, self-service outbound, and dynamic inventory statistics, specifically addressing various problems existing in the traditional management model.

The application for spare parts is mainly done through paper work orders. After the maintenance personnel fill out the documents offline, they need to go through a series of signature and approval procedures at each level. In emergency repair scenarios involving equipment, the offline circulation process will prolong the waiting time for material requisition and slow down the equipment maintenance progress. The archiving and preservation of paper documents is quite difficult, and the efficiency of checking spare parts consumption and tracing the corresponding maintenance equipment for later review is low. This makes it difficult to provide complete data support for the cost accounting of operation and maintenance consumables.

The warehouse requires staff to be on duty throughout the day. During the day shift, routine maintenance is carried out, and during the night shift, emergency repairs and material requisitioning are conducted. The warehouse keepers need to be present on-site to distribute the materials. The daily workload is quite heavy. There are nearly two hundred types of spare parts in the warehouse, with a wide variety of specifications. The inventory count relies on manual inspection of each item, which takes a long time. Moreover, there will be a data gap between the two inventory counts due to the time interval. The entry and exit information is registered manually, which is prone to omissions and errors. Monthly reconciliation of the accounts and physical inventory requires a large amount of manpower to verify the documents and physical items.

The entire unmanned warehouse solution mainly consists of storage carriers in the warehouse area, identity verification units at the entrances and exits, local edge data processing units, and a cloud-based comprehensive management platform. It is suitable for nearly two hundred types of maintenance spare parts storage and frequent work order collection scenarios in workshops.

Inside the warehouse, intelligent shelves are used as the storage carriers for spare parts. Enterprises can divide independent storage areas according to equipment models and spare part categories, ensuring that each item has its own designated place, thereby reducing the probability of different specifications of spare parts being mixed or wrongly taken. The intelligent shelves support flexible arrangement based on the existing space of the warehouse, without the need for large-scale renovations of the factory site. The flexibility of space allocation is strong, and it can be adapted to the storage of spare parts of various sizes and specifications.

The unmanned warehouse entrance is equipped with dual identification devices for card swiping and account passwords. Enterprises can divide and set access permissions for different levels of warehouse areas based on positions and teams. Only staff with the corresponding permissions can enter the warehouse for operations. The identity information of personnel entering and exiting the warehouse and the operation time will be automatically recorded, enabling full traceability of the operation behaviors of warehouse personnel.

Local data processing terminals are deployed in the warehouse area, independently storing all data related to inventory entry and exit, as well as spare parts access. The data is stored stably and can be simultaneously uploaded to the cloud backend, adapting to the complex network environment of the factory and reducing the possibility of data loss.

The platform serves as the core of the entire warehouse management system, covering all management functions such as online order submission, online approval, inventory data query, statistics of requisition ledgers, and safety inventory alerts. Managers can remotely view the real-time inventory quantities of two hundred types of spare parts through computers or mobile devices, and set their own inventory warning intervals. When the spare part inventory approaches the preset value, the system automatically sends a replenishment reminder, reducing the workload of manual regular inventory checks.

The submission and approval of work orders are all completed online, eliminating the need for filling out paper forms and offline signature processes. This shortens the waiting time for emergency material requisition and speeds up the equipment failure repair process, helping to maintain the stable production rhythm of the production line.

There is no need to assign personnel to be on-site to supervise the warehouse all day long. Instead, real-time inventory data from the platform can replace manual periodic inventory checks. The electronic ledger simplifies the monthly reconciliation work. Warehouse staff can shift their focus to core tasks such as spare parts procurement planning and inventory structure optimization, thereby optimizing the internal manpower allocation.

The work orders, personnel and inventory data are interrelated. Managers can statistically analyze the consumption of spare parts by shift, equipment and production area, providing complete and accurate data references for cost control of consumables and the formulation of spare parts procurement plans.

The unmanned warehouse can be set up by relying on open intelligent shelves combined with digital control software and hardware. It can serve as a standardized model for warehouse storage of maintenance materials in the factory area. It can be replicated and implemented in other storage areas for spare parts in the factory according to production needs, and the intelligentization of warehouse management can be completed in stages.

Equipment maintenance spare parts are the essential materials for ensuring the continuous production of manufacturing lines. In the workshop environment where multiple types of spare parts are frequently and repeatedly used, the traditional management model combining paper-based documents with manual supervision is prone to reducing the overall operational efficiency.

The unmanned warehouse, utilizing intelligent shelves as its storage platform and relying on an integrated digital control system, has connected the entire chain from online work order approval to self-service storage and retrieval within the warehouse area. It automatically collects inventory-related data while simultaneously addressing the pain points of both maintenance personnel and warehouse management staff, offering a practical and feasible solution for the digital and lean upgrade of spare parts storage in manufacturing workshops.