What is the future of the Warehouse?

Photo by Ramon Cordeiro on Unsplash

The future is notoriously difficult to predict. Noted American business thinker, educator and author, Peter Drucker famously quipped that “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window”. The quote has a key message: predicting the future is hard, perhaps even dangerous. So what is the future of the warehouse?

Environment and Safe Warehousing

With global warming and climate change, the environment is the key issue of our time, so it’s important the future of warehousing and logistics recognise that. Warehouse safety and the environment cannot be ignored in the pursuit of profit. The results can be catastrophic, as the recent explosions in Tianjin, China demonstrate. History shows us unsafe production, unsafe storage and environmental disaster usually go hand in hand.

We’re not suggesting damaged pallet racking will lead to an environmental apocalypse. But it is unsafe and could lead to an environmental accident. As highlighted in last month’s article, regular pallet and shelving inspections and a comprehensive safety programme should be part of your best practice, moving forward. Regular pallet racking inspections will help ensure businesses are safer and are looking to the future.  

Sustainability

Sustainability is an increasingly important goal for business. Future warehouses should invest in sustainable practices. Warehouses cause a significant amount of energy consumption due to lighting, heating, cooling and air condition, as well as fixed and mobile material handling equipment (e.g. forklifts), which produces considerable carbon dioxide emissions. 

Top performing warehouses of the future will be those that invest in sustainable practices. A green audit can help reduce your impact on the environment and improve sustainability. A green audit is an official examination of the activities of an organisation in order to see how much it harms the environment and how much energy it uses. It’s not a new concept – it dates back to the early 70s. However, expect more companies to make green audits part of their sustainability commitment and to reduce energy use and lessen their impact on the environment.

Robotics on the rise

Using robots and digital technology to increase warehouse efficiency is growing. Amazon is likely at the forefront when it comes to warehouse automation. It uses countless programmes and machines to do a large amount of work in their warehouses. This will only increase in the future.

Technology is seeing the emergence of mobile collaborative robots that travel to a picking location where a warehouse associate drops an item into a cart. Stationary piece-picking robots then pick items from a storage tote and place them in a shipping container. We’re even seeing autonomous mobile piece-picking robots that can travel to a location, pick an item and travel to the next location, and so on, until the order is complete.

E-commerce and Fulfilment

The warehouse of the past was a place to store finished goods that moved in and out on pallets. Corporate considered them a necessary evil and a cost centre. The rise of E-commerce is changing modern warehousing and logistics. Online shopping has increased demand and increased supply. Today, warehouses are promise keepers: their job is to enable a company’s go-to-market strategy and make good on the promises made by the marketing and sales departments.

Because of E-commerce, recent years have seen the logistics sector make a great effort to achieve guaranteed delivery times of just one or two days. It now finds itself in a situation where it has to go after even more demanding objectives, with delivery times on the same day and even some hours after the order has been placed. A scenario that would have been unthinkable a few years ago is expected to be the norm within the next ten years. This will make it essential to have more warehouse space or resort to metal racking designed to provide more space, such as mezzanines and multi-tier racking.

Hyperlocal Warehousing

While not so relevant to a geographically small country like New Zealand, a big retail trend that will impact the warehousing industry in the US over the next few years perhaps more than any other external factor is the rise in hyperlocal warehousing. As part of their attempts to compete with ecommerce, several major US retailers have begun to look to hyperlocal, regionally-targeted warehouses to get product to their consumers faster. These retail locations have turned to carefully-placed hyperlocal warehouses to deliver product the next day… or even faster.

What will change in your warehousing?

Watch the warehouse space carefully. What’s happening in your industry? Will your warehouse be ready for the future?

Book a FREE health check for 2020 Now!

So what are you waiting for? Start by making sure your installations are compliant in 2020 with our FREE Health Check. We’ll ensure your systems are up to today’s codes, which will help protect your business, keep your staff safer and give you peace-of-mind. Book your free health check now.