Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) have gained a lot of traction over the years as more and more warehouses, order fulfillment operations, and materials handling operations have embraced the technology. And it makes sense why: There are many advantages to using AS/RS to automate or partially-automate a warehouse.
With this growing use of AS/RS, the logical question that comes to mind for many warehouse managers is: How can I know whether AS/RS is a good fit for my industry and for my operation? Is investing in AS/RS the right decision for my business? What is the ROI of implementing AS/RS? What are the pros and cons of using AS/RS that I can weigh to decide whether or not implementing them makes sense for my business?
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If you’re thinking about using AS/RS technology to automate your warehouse or order fulfillment operation, it’s important to realize that they are not a perfect fit for every industry, operation, or business. To help you determine whether or not implementing AS/RS makes sense for your operation, we’ve compiled a list of the major pros and cons of AS/RS that you should consider before making any decision.
Advantages of Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS)
1. Reduced Labor Costs
By implementing an automated storage and retrieval system in your operation, you can reduce labor costs in a number of ways. In extreme cases, some operations can employ a single AS/RS to replace all picking labor, freeing up workers to focus on other more productive functions. Although this is not typical, the potential efficiencies gained by a thoughtfully executed AS/RS can have a positive and lasting impact on your profitability. By removing the need to expand your workforce, the one-time investment of purchasing and implementing the AS/RS system has the potential to remove the ongoing costs that would come with a new hire such as healthcare, payroll taxes, salary increases, training, etc.
2. Fewer Labor Constraints
Even if an operation has the funds to expand their workforce with new hires, sometimes outside factors (geography, job market, demographic trends) can constrain the labor supply and make it difficult to expand. AS/RS removes some of these constraints by allowing automation to take the place of employees. This means that warehouse employees can be redirected to higher-value tasks that make your operation more profitable while lower-value, repetitive tasks are handled by technology.
3. Increased Safety
Whether because of distraction, fatigue, hunger, psychological or emotional stress, one thing is certain: Humans make mistakes. When humans make mistakes while operating heavy machinery such as forklifts, tragedy can result. Incorporating AS/RS systems into your operation allows you to remove some of this unpredictable human element by replacing workers with machines that do not get tired or distracted. This can have a tremendous positive impact on an operation by increasing safety, thereby reducing accidents and damage to the product, structures, and equipment.
4. Increased Accuracy, Productivity, and Efficiency
As mentioned above, humans are error prone. No matter how well-trained or diligent, eventually errors will happen. In addition to causing safety issues or damaging product, these errors can also impact workflows and lead to inefficiency. A pallet of product delivered from storage to the wrong department can, for example, cause confusion, traffic jams, and a shutdown of order processing until the error is fixed. By allowing AS/RS systems to manage the components of your operation that can be automated, these inefficiencies can be removed, ultimately reducing waste and increasing output. And all of this will allow your operation to become more accurate and, therefore, profitable.
5. Can be Modular
Though an AS/RS system can be a costly expense for an operation to absorb (as we discuss below), one often overlooked benefit is the fact that they can be modular. An operation can migrate inventory segments into AS/RS one at a time—for example, prioritizing fast-moving product first—limiting initial expense, and allowing you to slowly transition to full automation.
6. Better Use of Space
AS/RS carries another benefit for operations that are constrained by a small footprint. By making better use of the space available in a facility, AS/RS can remove the need for a costly redesign or expansion. AS/RS typically requires narrower aisles than do human-operated forklifts; racks can reclaim vertical space, and automation can allow for high-density storage that is difficult to achieve by traditional means.
Disadvantages of Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS)
1. High Initial Investment
In the long run, implementing an automated storage and retrieval system is likely to reduce labor costs and increase productivity. But these benefits come at a cost: The cost of the initial investment. Like many automation endeavors, purchasing an AS/RS is more expensive in the short term than hiring personnel or using other equipment such as forklifts. This initial investment can be a challenge for smaller operations that don’t have ready access to capital (although equipment leasing options can help some businesses reduce this barrier to entry).
2. Maintenance
As with any kind of equipment or technology, AS/RS will need to undergo routine maintenance and occasional repair. This will undoubtedly lead to some operational downtime as occasional repairs and maintenance are made. And though still cheaper than the ongoing costs of hiring and employing additional staff, the costs of this maintenance should be considered before implementing any new system.
3. Not Suitable for Highly Variable Operations
AS/RS, like all automation technologies, are best suited for operations that have regular, predictable, and repetitive tasks. Operations that vary widely in terms of product or materials handled from week to week or month to month may find it difficult to make AS/RS fit into their business plan. Because AS/RS works according to preset systems, processes, and analysis, rapid change can be difficult to facilitate.
4. Can Require Technical Skill and Retraining
As with any new warehouse equipment, your employees will need to be adequately trained to safely handle your new AS/RS systems and get the most out of the technology. This will, of course, lead to some downtime while training takes place, and could lead to turnover of current staff.
The Bottom Line
Though AS/RS is a powerful tool that can dramatically increase productivity, efficiency, and profitability for many operations in many industries, it isn’t for everyone. If you are considering implementing an automated storage and retrieval system in your facility, be sure to weigh the pros and cons of AS/RS use that we have outlined above to determine whether they would complement your operations.
There are several mature, tested approaches to migrating workloads to the cloud. We’ll follow the five approaches in Gartner’s “5 Rs” cloud migration strategy model—rehost (lift and shift), refactor, replatform, rebuild and replace—with a special focus on the first three approaches.
In this post, we’ll review the five cloud migration approaches and explain the lift and shift, refactor and rebuild approaches, with a detailed review of their pros and cons, to help you select the most appropriate approach for each workload. In addition, we’ll show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help with data and storage aspects of your migration.
In this article, you will learn:
What Is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving some or all your digital operations to your cloud. There are three main types of cloud migration you can perform — on-premises to cloud, cloud to cloud, or cloud to on-premises. When performing any of these three migration types, there are five methods and strategies you can use. The strategies were first defined in the Gartner “5 Rs” model in 2011.These strategies are:
- Lift and shift—moving applications to the cloud as-is. This is also sometimes referred to as rehosting.
- Refactor—modifying applications to better support the cloud environment.
- Replatform—moving applications to the cloud without major changes, but taking advantage of benefits of the cloud environment.
- Rebuild—rewrite the application from scratch.
- Replace—retire the application and replace it with a new cloud-native application.
In the following sections we’ll explain the first three strategies in depth, with their pros and cons.
Also refer to our in-depth article on cloud migration tools that can help you automate and simplify your migration.
1. The Lift and Shift Migration Approach and its Pros and Cons
The “Lift and shift” approach involves dropping the application into the cloud as-is and hoping that it works. Lift and shift is possible for many workloads, and cloud vendors like AWS and Azure are working to make it as easy as possible.
One of the critical steps to ensuring lift and shift actually works is to ensure the application, which until recently operated in the local data center, still has access to the same documents and data once it is in the cloud.
An example is the Microsoft Azure Files service. Azure Files allows cloud VMs to mount file shares that are identical to those in the on-premise environment. This makes lift and shift possible, because you can move workloads from the data center to the cloud, and they still have access to the same shared folders.
Advantages of Lift and Shift Migration
Lift and shift has the following advantages:
- No code or architecture changes—applications are rehosted to the cloud with no significant application or infrastructure changes, eliminating costly development and testing.
- Migrate core services easily—you can move critical core services like Active Directory quickly and directly. This presents minimal risk and disruption to business activity.
- Easier compliance and security management—since applications aren’t changing security and compliance properties also stay largely the same and just need to be mapped to new resources.
Disadvantages of Lift and Shift Migration
Lift and shift has the following disadvantages:
- Does not take full advantage of the cloud—legacy applications are not scalable and do not allow for distributed workloads like cloud-native applications do.
- Latency and performance—on-premise applications might suffer from latency or performance issues after migration, because they were not optimized or modified to suit the cloud environment.
- Increased risk—migrating an application with known problems may result in increased risks after migration.
- Migration failures—the migration process might fail if the organization doesn't accurately map application requirements to the corresponding cloud configuration.
2. The Refactoring Migration Approach and its Pros and Cons
Refactoring is the process of moving applications to cloud infrastructure, while re-architecting them to better suit the cloud environment. This strategy involves modifying your existing software, or a large chunk of the code base, to take advantage of cloud-based features and the flexibility and elasticity that comes with them.
Refactoring is much more complex than other cloud migration approaches, because it requires application code changes, and needs to be tested carefully to avoid regressions in functionality. You also need to ensure that the application is built for better resource utilization in the cloud, to avoid incurring high costs.
While the refactoring approach is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive, it can provide the highest return on investment once you are running in the cloud.
Advantages of Refactoring
The advantages of refactoring are mainly long-term benefits:
- Long-term cost savings—can reduce costs by matching actual resource requirements with cloud infrastructure. The ability to scale as needed reduces resource consumption and provides long lasting ROI of your refactoring efforts.
- Adapting to changing requirements—cloud-native and microservices architectures allow applications to rapidly change to adapt to new customer requirements, by adding new features or modifying existing functionality.
- Increased resilience—by decoupling application components and wiring together managed solutions that provide high availability, the application inherits the durability of this cloud.
Disadvantages of Refactoring
The disadvantages of refactoring are:
- Vendor lock-in—the more cloud-native your application is, the more cloud features it is likely to consume. This makes applications tightly coupled to the public cloud you are using.
- Time—refactoring is resource-intensive and much more complex than a lift-and-shift migration, meaning projects take much longer to start showing business value.
- Skills—refactoring isn't for beginners. It requires advanced coding, automation, and DevOps skills.
- Getting it wrong—refactoring means changing many aspects of the application, so there is a high risk of errors at the code, configuration, and infrastructure level. Each mistake can cause delays, cost escalations, and possible outages.
3. The Replatforming Migration Approach and its Pros and Cons
A replatform migration is the middle ground between the two strategies we covered above. It’s similar to rehosting applications on the cloud, but it does involve some modification of the application to take advantage of the new cloud infrastructure.
There are some common modifications that are typically performed during replatforming. For example:
- Changing the way the program interacts with the database to benefit from automation and an elastic database infrastructure.
- Enabling better scaling and leveraging reserved resources in the cloud environment with minimal code changes.
Advantages of Replatforming
Advantages of replatforming include:
- Cost-efficient—this approach is cost effective and does not require a major development project.
- Start small and scale as needed—replatforming lets you move some workloads to the cloud, experiment with the cloud environment, learn lessons and then move on to other workloads, without committing to a large migration effort.
- Cloud-native functionality—re-platforming allows applications to leverage cloud capabilities like auto-scaling, managed storage and data processing services, infrastructure as code (IaC), and more.
Disadvantages of Replatforming
Disadvantages of replatforming include:
- Work scope can grow—“scope creep” can turn a replatforming project into a full-blown refactoring project. Managing scope and preventing unnecessary changes is essential to mitigate this problem.
- Aggressive changes—to minimize work, you need to stick to common, well known cloud components. Specialized components often require dramatic changes to the application, and may not be worthwhile unless they provide high business value or use is unavoidable.
- Automation is required—re-platforming is extremely limited if the resulting workload in the cloud is managed manually. This means you are required to invest in basic automation that provides some level of flexibility when operating the system in the cloud.
Take Your Cloud Migration Approach with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Migrating to the cloud is a major undertaking. But part of it also involves understanding how your new environment will operate once you get your data to the cloud. Fortunately, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help with both.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP assists with lift and shift cloud migration. NetApp BlueXP classification is a tool that can automatically discover, map, classify, and act on enterprise data. For companies planning migrations, these capabilities help to identify private data that need protection, and pinpoint duplicate and stale data so you can carry out clean migration.
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