About Motherson Group

The Motherson Group is an Indian manufacturer of wiring harnesses, plastic components, and rearview mirrors for passenger cars. They are a Tier 1 automotive supplier, serving all major car brands worldwide. The Motherson Group employs around 150,000 people located in over 270 facilities across 41 countries. They operate a warehouse of approximately 9,400 m² in Hegyeshalom, Hungary, which serves their state-of-the-art plants in the region.

Challenges and Goals

Whatever challenges and goals they are trying to tackle, they never do so without considering the sustainability aspect of their decisions. The Motherson Group takes pride in their achievements regarding sustainability and being a responsible global citizen. Sustainability permeates their entire operations, from material selection and product design to supplier management, energy usage, waste handling, and product delivery.

Here are the key challenges and goals the Motherson Group faced before working with Aeriu:

• They had implemented several automation projects in the past, but never achieved the desired results.

• Strict internal regulations prohibited lifting people with forklifts, so they had to manually move each pallet down twice, check the barcodes for each box, even in the case of full and homogeneous pallets.

• Improve the accuracy of inventory checks.

• They wanted to allocate more time to production and less time to inventory checking. They can’t produce in their factory while conducting inventory checks in the warehouse.

Let's elaborate on the last point. The more time they spent on inventory checks, the more time they lost in production, affecting their profitability. The Motherson Group sought a better solution for their inventory check, which used to take them three sets of 24 hours with 30 people working in shifts of 8 to 12 hours.

Solution

To expedite the inventory recheck process, the Motherson Group decided to implement Warehouse Drones from Aeriu. Instead of using forklifts and lifting people to check inventory, they simply navigate a drone up and down, taking pictures of the inventory. The images are automatically uploaded to the Aeriu Cloud, which analyzes them and highlights potential issues. Aeriu Cloud is designed to seamlessly integrate with any Warehouse Management System, enabling effortless data migration.

They initially trained two drone pilots and plan to increase the number to four. The drones they use are stock Mavic Air 2 drones by DJI.

Implementation

Aeriu requires internet connectivity to transfer the drone images to the cloud inventory. During the implementation, the Motherson Group's warehouse in Hegyeshalom had an unreliable wireless network. Aeriu made custom software improvements to the solution to avoid costly hardware investments for the Motherson Group.

Six months elapsed from the decision to implementation completion. This timeframe encompassed contracting, drone pilot training, drone base setup, AI fine-tuning, and solution testing.

Outcome

Aeriu is utilized for rechecking the inventory of 6,400+ pallets. During the recheck, they examine 50% of the pallets, so Aeriu is employed to check approximately 3,200 pallets each time. Previously, it took two people working simultaneously for six sets of 12 hours to complete this task.

With Aeriu, it now takes only 12 hours with a single person working a shift, resulting in a 90% reduction in man-hours. They have been able to concurrently accomplish various tasks, leading to significant time savings.

Not only have they achieved savings in man-hours, but more importantly, they can now produce an additional day's worth of output in the factory. This is a tremendous boost for the company.