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2023 Warehouse Equipment Survey: Tighter budgets prompt targeted spend

If last year the spigot on materials handling system investments was nearly wide open, this year a more conservative approach is revealed in our annual survey into automation spending and related trends. The spigot isn’t being shut off, but there is some fiddling of that spigot to find just the right flow of automation spend and projects to arrive at productivity gains that will help contain costs over the longer term. Our “Annual Warehouse and Distribution Center (DC) Equipment Survey” sets out to find how much was spent on materials handling automation, equipment, and related software over the past year,…

Warehouse automation survey: Levels and total cost of ownership (TCO) concerns are on the rise

我们的年度自动化调查结果, and while the spend level finding isn’t in overdrive mode like last year, this year we found higher “in use” levels across many of the automation, robotics, software and equipment categories our survey examines. Companies also are putting a high priority on system maintenance and uptime to help meet tougher service levels amid continued labor availability challenges. The heightened concern we found last year around service parts availability declined in importance, while issues like total cost of ownership (TCO) and service response time gained. Overall, this year’s findings point to operations…

User priorities drive motive power choices

The proverbial fork in the road comes fast when an operation starts looking at all the power choices available for lift truck fleets. The options include lead-acid batteries, which remain the bulk of the market for electric trucks used indoors; newer advanced twists on lead-acid such as thin-plate pure lead (TPPL) designed for opportunity charging; and lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in multiple chemistries, which boast impressive productivity gains for higher volume, multi-shift operations because of their fast opportunity charging and other advantages. Hydrogen fuel cells are another option, and oh yes, you can opt for “drop-in” Li-ion batteries, or integrated Li-ion…

Scaling mobile robotic fleets for success

More automation doesn’t necessarily mean better automation. That’s why an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) deployment with an impressive number of bots in the fleet isn’t necessarily more effective than one with just a handful. While it’s common for AMR deployments to start small and get bigger, success with AMRs takes more than growing the fleet. You need to consider how quickly and easily you can add more robots and people into a robotic-enabled workflow to meet spikes in demand, software capabilities, and the ability to integrate with other systems as well as human labor. AMRs come in various form factors…

Warehouse automation market growth is expected to cool in 2023

The warehouse automation market has been on a tear the last couple of years, driven by major spending by Amazon and other companies with ecommerce fulfillment operations. With the ecommerce surge that occurred during the early months of the pandemic, companies with fulfillment operations looked to expand their DC networks and the automation used within them, fueling record growth for providers of warehouse automation systems. The magnitude of this recent growth is detailed in a new study from research firm Interact Analysis, which found the market grew by 28% in 2021, with revenues reaching $36 billion, up from $28.5 billion…

2022 Warehouse/DC Operations Survey: Recalibrating operations and spending

The main findings of our annual “Warehouse Operations & Trends Survey” have been consistent the last few years: rising budgets for warehouse and distribution center (DC) automation, coupled with deep concern about being able to find and retain warehouse staff. This year’s pool of respondents—readers involved with running warehouse and DC operations—now have other concerns that topped the staffing issue, and when we asked about capital expenditure (capex) plans for the coming year, it was lower than last year. This year’s respondent pool did have more smaller companies in the mix than last year; but nevertheless, it broke a string…

Inventory Management in an Automated World

Forget the global supply chain snarls for a moment and consider another changing reality with inventory: the increasingly intricate flow of goods and inventory transactions involved inside today’s fulfillment centers. While warehouse management system (WMS) software solutions have long been responsible for inventory control in DCs, the complexity of inventory flows and inventory visibility in a modern fulfillment center is a far cry from mainly manual DCs of the not too distant past, where one forward picking zone often served the whole operation. Today, by contrast, fulfillment centers might have multiple zones of automation with subsystems like automated storage and…

Autonomous Lift Trucks: The human equation

A fundamental distinction with autonomous lift trucks often gets overlooked: Autonomous lift trucks typically need some level of human oversight and help. Even robotic lift trucks, designed to operate in full autonomous mode, have some type of performance monitoring and exception handling technology that features a human in a support role. Additionally, “dual-mode” trucks are capable of operating autonomously, but designed so a trained operator can get on the unit and make use of it for ad-hoc tasks. For certain, greater industry uptake of autonomous lift trucks will reduce the need for human operators overall, but humans will still play…

Warehouse/DC equipment survey: It’s “go time” for investment

The simplest way to describe the overall findings from this year’s “Annual Warehouse and Distribution Center (DC) Equipment Survey” is that it’s “go-time” for investment in warehouse automation. The budget findings in our annual survey jumped up, with elevated interest and use levels for numerous types of materials handling automation, including mobile robots and other forms of warehouse robotics. However, the findings suggest more than a crude swap out of human labor in favor of automation. Respondents to our 2022 survey—which asks readers about their spending outlook on warehouse automation, materials handling equipment, and related software—also shows an uptick in…

2022 Top 10 Supply Chain Software Suppliers

The large-scale disruptions that have beset global supply chains since mid-2020 have been challenging for nearly everyone, but the industry response carries one silver lining: The chaos has nudged, maybe even pushed, more companies into modernizing their supply chain management (SCM) software applications. Though newer Cloud-based SCM software isn’t a quick fix, ongoing disruption likely has convinced some decision makers that it is time to invest in newer solutions, as evidenced by the high growth year for SCM software in 2021. According to market research by Gartner Inc., which is the basis for this list of the Top 10 SCM…

Lift truck safety gets proactive with sensors

Even when lift truck operators get sufficient training and pass their certifications, there’s a risk to operating lift trucks or working on foot in their vicinity. Intersections and aisles get busy with traffic, including other lift trucks, associates working on foot, and increasingly, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Dock areas get congested, and loading or unloading trailers with lift trucks also poses potential dangers, especially if trailers aren’t properly restrained. Goods falling from overhead is always a risk, as are pallets or goods left in unexpected positions on floors. These risks have long existed, but now industry trends like growth in…

Warehouse Automation: Why software is the star

Conventional wisdom posits that the market for warehouse automation is exploding because companies with fulfillment operations can’t find enough workers to stick with largely manual processes in the face of rapidly growing e-commerce volumes. That idea has companies looking at autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and other types of warehouse automation, such as robotic, high-density goods-to-person (GTP) systems, as well as more traditional automation, to do more with less for crucial processes. All of this thinking is true, but it glosses over a fundamental challenge operations face as they implement more automation: getting multiple systems to work together in unison and…

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