• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.61-69
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• 2016

Since 2000, the market of convenient stores in Korea has developed rapidly due to the explosive growth in single households but it still consists mainly of manual work due to the nature of the domestic industry. Hence the explosive increase in demand in the market is mostly due to workers. Therefore, the research aimed at encouraging efficiency via automation, which is carried out in manufacturing, such as electronic, cars and so on, is inadequate. This study performed a feasibility analysis of investment for introducing an automated system on brand A, which is domestic famous convenience store company. Productivity growth according to the introduction of an automated guided vehicle and the cost-benefits was studied with using a simulation for the picking process, which is most personnel and time consuming. As a result, the simulation showed that the equipment AGV introduced for choosing the process has the effects of cost saving and increased time efficiency for performing manual labor. Furthermore, appropriate numbers of AGV were forecasted considering the capacity of the distribution Center in the brand A convenient store, which has been growing steadily. There are increasing numbers of worker labor costs in the distribution industry these days. Before building a large new automate center, it is expected to provide a good information to investors who are considering increasing productivity through partial automation of each of unit process to achieve some cost reduction.