Orchestrating the Frictionless Brownfield

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How to Extend Asset Lifecycles, Minimize Capital Exposure,
and Unlock Hidden Capacity Within Your Existing Four Walls

It’s a common scenario — you’ve decided to remain in your existing facility but need it to do more, be more efficient, and deliver the cost savings your business is seeking. In short, you have to integrate technologies, employ software, streamline manual operations and use data to optimize everything in real time. Where do you start and who do you partner with to help you understand the full opportunity, from strategy to execution?

Our team at Hy-Tek Intralogistics is breaking down all of this and more in our new three-part series dedicated to the unique, often complex considerations with brownfield operations and how to maximize capacity, productivity and potential within your four walls.  

It Starts with Strategy

By Clayton Sprunck, director of strategic services, Hy-Tek Intralogistics

If you read global warehouse automation headlines, you’d think the only path to survival is the “Big Bang” greenfield build — a multi-million dollar, single-vendor facility engineered from the ground up. But for most North American supply chain leaders, that may not be an option. With economic uncertainty, high interest rates, labor shortages and other factors changing almost daily, forcing a greenfield build can introduce risk; often more risk than your organization is willing to take.

So, what are your options? The reality is that the market has shifted toward a substantial Brownfield Wave, where savvy operations are uncovering strategies for optimizing their existing spaces to set the stage for the growth and efficiencies they’re seeking. In fact, data reveals that warehouse automation spend per square foot in North America is rising steadily – projected to hit $1.16/sq ft by 2030. This means operators are driving capital-intensive retrofits into existing spaces rather than taking on new lease overhead.

It All Starts with Understanding Where You Are and Where You Can Go

At Hy-Tek, our Strategic Services team helps you establish and quantify current capacities and to set priorities and direction before looking at Solutions. This early look at your best path forward helps you to confidently meet short- and long-term goals and create action plans for putting targeted recommendations into place. Then, we’ll work with you throughout the process to test, learn, and optimize for lasting success.

“Often, a brownfield project is about more than making the best use of space,” said Clayton Sprunck, director of Strategic Services at Hy-Tek Intralogistics. “It’s about striking the right balance of manual and automated tasks, bringing siloed technology together, gaining a single view of the operation, and leveraging integrated software solutions to obtain a single view of the business so that utilization and capacity increase.”

Sprunck added that most businesses are seeking to accomplish one or more of three outcomes with a brownfield project: optimizing labor, gaining capacity or improving their return on overall investment. For nearly all clients, none of these happen in isolation; they are interconnected and for the best results, should be addressed together.

“Our team focuses on all of these in tandem so that the recommendations made for space optimization naturally flow into how a client thinks about automating tasks and best use of labor,” he said.

Determine a Quantified Current-State Baseline

Before evaluating potential solutions, an effective brownfield strategy begins by establishing and quantifying the operation’s current capacities and constraints. This includes understanding available storage capacity, process throughput, labor requirements, equipment utilization, material flow, facility limitations, and performance during peak operating conditions. Creating this fact-based baseline clarifies where capacity is available, where constraints are limiting performance, and which issues present the greatest operational or business risks. With these conditions clearly defined, you can establish a strategic direction, prioritize improvement opportunities, and evaluate solutions against measurable requirements rather than assumptions.

A Detailed Roadmap For Success

Once the baseline is established, the next step is for the team to align to the comprehensive, customized roadmap. This process provides recommended changes — both strategic and tactical — that can improve operational performance. It also provides timelines, a recommended order of implementation and expected impact to the business.

“With brownfield engagements, they can often be more complex than new builds,” Sprunck said. “While there are cost savings and other benefits for retrofitting your existing space, you also have to embrace the limitations that may exist.” He went on to add that this could include space considerations, the available labor pool in the market where the facility is located, and other factors.

Hy-Tek also helps clients assess internal dynamics like operational readiness for large-scale migrations. Having a detailed plan to follow is only one piece of the puzzle; prepping your teams, processes and customers for an orchestrated implementation is something else entirely. “When we’re helping clients with a facility that is fully operational, there are complex considerations for implementing with the least amount of disruption possible.”

This is where the migration roadmap — part of the overall assessment Hy-Tek provides — is critical. Clients often take things for granted, or overlook them completely, and these overlooked factors can have lasting and negative implications for the long-term success of the business. Here are a few to consider with your operation:

Labor requirements: Will your brownfield implementation require additional labor throughout migration? Will you need extra team members to work off hours so that customer disruptions are avoided?

Electrical requirements: New equipment and technology may have different power requirements than are currently available within your facility.

Ceiling hang and other space limitations: Can the building accommodate the new infrastructure you might be considering?

Data needs: With new data requirements and software enhancements, there will be peak volumes and capacities that will need to be addressed.

Business growth: As your business grows, are you creating a plan that will grow with you? Your operation’s needs may change over time. For instance, direct-to-store models may move to a centralized distribution concept . Will you be set up to migrate to this with the least amount of friction and disruption?

“Our roadmaps are about helping clients realize true margin recovery, and we know this comes from digital and operational readiness,” Sprunck added. “Before our team helps you look at automation hardware and robotics, — which is what clients may want to immediately focus on —  we will provide an assessment that contains a data hygiene audit and location-sizing analysis.” This uncovers the quick wins — like hands-free wearable scanning or optimized order assignment sequencing—to compress your picking footprint first. He said that by focusing on immediate tasks like these, clients can build the confidence to move forward toward the larger investments needed to make a brownfield engagement the smart choice.

Building the Business Case

Often, a key element in realizing ROI is in finding hidden capacity inside your active footprint. Operational assessments help clients find where they have room to grow and where Hy-Tek’s integrated approach can influence every stage of your journey—from strategy and design to software integration, staged implementation and onward to lifecycle optimization. “This measured, step-by-step approach often helps prove to our clients’ CFOs that space optimization beats real estate over-expansion every single time,” added Sprunck.

To learn more about the Strategic Services team at Hy-Tek and how they can help your organization make the most out of your brownfield optimization, contact us at Contact Us – Hy-Tek Intralogistics

In part two of our blog series, we’ll dig into robotics and automation and how to avoid the “automation frankenstack”.