Clicks, Bricks & Orders: Warehousing gets an e-commerce makeover

What’s next in warehousing?

So, what’s the next stage of warehouse evolution? Unsurprisingly, it seems likely that innovations already on the industry’s horizon will become more common in warehousing to solve problems, both old and new.

One such widely acknowledged issue is the siloed nature of the supply chain. As ShipBob’s Saxena noted, “Manufacturer, fulfillment, order management software, transport management systems for shipping labels with UPS, FedEx and UPS – these are all antiquated, and so the information they have is not always up to date.” This is a well-known truth across the industry, and the recent push toward data-sharing and cloud-based systems indicates the industry is at last working on methods to address the problem.

“We are trying to create a software solution that plugs into all of these areas, so you can see information about manufacturers, all your orders, inventory levels – and everyone in the supply chain needs to have access to that same information,” Saxena said.

The sharing of information is the idea that some supply-chain participants have been hesitant to get onboard with, but Saxena expects new technology will be the key to achieving the necessary sharing of information. “I think what we’re going to be seeing in the next three-to-five-year timeframe is software solutions that make all of the silos talk to one another,” Saxena added.

Warehouse REIT’s Bird expects changes in hardware to have a similarly large effect on the warehouse of the future. He said that the “buzzword” topics of robotics and artificial intelligence have not yet made major inroads into warehouses mainly because “the market has enjoyed a lot of availability of relatively low price-point labor.” That may be changing with recent low unemployment levels pushing wages up. “As prices go up, I think people will be increasingly looking to take the human element out of the warehouse and invest in automation,” he said. This is already becoming a trend in larger warehouses, Bird observed, and companies with those warehouses can already afford to pay more to secure the labor they need. The necessity of competing with those companies as wages rise, Bird added, “will be the initiative to see greater automation in warehouses.”