Inventory cycle counting process in large warehouses is a tedious and time-consuming process involving risks of inaccuracies as well as employee safety, especially in high rack storages. With the Azure IoT Edge framework, reliable video streams of handling units in storage racks can be obtained from high-resolution cameras mounted on drones or at fixed places in the warehouse. These streams can be broken down and analyzed in real-time to determine inventory count per part of the number which can be reconciled with the system inventory in the system of records like SAP S/4 HANA or SAP EWM. The SAP Cloud Platform provides the best in class user experience and decision support for the user by integrating the IoT Edge feeds and enabling the next best action to update system stock or take decisions like scrapping or recount.

Business Challenge

•Difficult to update system inventory in large warehouses

•High human effort in physical counting

•Missing items due to human access difficulties

•Lack of automated and accurate inventory count solutions

Solution Overview

•Camera mounted drone-based physical inventory counting

•Drone and storage bins

•Machine learning algorithms extract the stock information from the incoming feed from drone

•Actual inventory count automatically updated in SAP

•Rich persona-based user interface built on SAP Cloud Platform for WH managers

Business Benefits

•Accelerated physical inventory counting

•Real time and automatic update of count in WMS

•Safe navigation through high racks and narrow storage spaces

•Higher operational efficiency across multiple warehouses

•Increased stock visibility and transparency

Infosys SAP S/4HANA – Smart Warehouse cycle count

by Infosys Limited