Virtual Reality, A Secret Weapon to Boost Efficiency of a Warehouse

Yasas Sri Wickramasinghe
3 min readMay 3, 2021

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VR is not a science fiction or a technology limited to researches. Still, nowadays,It has become a tool to make some tasks way easier and more efficient than we assume. But as many think, Virtual Reality is only good at Gaming or Entertainment related fields. However, its powerful capabilities have already unlocked the potential of adapting it to many more industries, including “Warehouse Management.”

Aerial View of a Warehouse (Source : www.unsplash.com)

What is the Problem with Warehouse Management that we are focusing on?

High Turnover Rate of employees

  • High Employee Training cost due to new employees joining throughout the year
  • Unskilled or less experienced employees will Reduce Warehouse Efficiency

Mostly, people working at warehouses are working for a roaster/part-time based. These people are mostly changing jobs, and Warehouses have a tremendous employee turnover rate compared to other industries.

Source : https://www.refrigiwear.com/knowledge-center/reducing-employee-turnover

Employee turnover might sound routine in the warehouse industry. Still, if you dig into actual figures and relate them to financials, it’s clear that a high turnover rate directly impacts business performance and financial goals. Some clearly identifiable factors associated with the on-boarding new employee to a warehouse as follow,

Cost Factors

  • Training Time is a Cost
  • Training Resources have a Cost
  • Allocation of skilled person to train unskilled person has a Cost

Safety Factors

  • Inexperienced new joiners tend to face with more workplace injuries, accidents

How to solve these problems ?

If we can reduce the training cost of new employees and make employee training much more effective, making sure new employees’ safety can solve this problem we discussed above.
For this, Virtual Reality(VR) comes handy

Why Virtual Reality ?

Source : https://www.pexels.com/photo/boy-in-yellow-crew-neck-t-shirt-using-white-and-black-vr-box-4144152/
  • Virtual Reality(VR) can be utilized to give employee training as an immersive learning experience replacing ‘physical’ on-the-job training.
  • This solution is reasonably affordable, reduces workplace accidents, and, most importantly.
  • VR-based training programs can be used to evaluate the training efficiency of new employees. And data can be collected to enhance the training program.
  • Employees can be trained to handle challenging conditions.
  • VR-based training applications can be developed to support multiple languages.
  • Multiple user-based collaborative VR platforms make training programs more engaging and interactive.

Conclusion

In this article, we analyzed some problems related to warehouse management and discussed how Virtual Reality can be helpful as a solution.
There are many Virtual Reality based applications in the market to solve this problem. If you are to develop a custom solution, there are some valuable researches to follow as well. I’ll discuss those in the next article.

Thank you for reading. :)

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