AS/RS.

Racking plus machines that put stock away and bring it back without anyone walking to a shelf: aisle cranes, shuttles in a rack face, or robots driving over a grid of stacked bins. Goods-to-person names where the operator stands, AS/RS names the storage that feeds them, and because most current systems do both, the two get used as if they were one word. For a POD plant the case is rarely picking speed. It is that blanks in dozens of sizes, colors and cuts stop eating floor: Exotec's Skypod stacks to 45 feet and quotes up to 600 bins an hour at each station, and AutoStore builds comparable density from bins on a grid. The figure that decides whether the investment earns its keep is presentations per hour at the station, not storage capacity, because presentations are what the print and pack lines consume. The failure is buffer arithmetic: an AS/RS that stores blanks beautifully will still starve a press if the induction points downstream cannot absorb what it delivers.