Happy warehouse employees: the key to better retail

The rapid expan­sion of the ecom­merce sec­tor since the onset of the pan­dem­ic has led to ever-grow­ing retail­er reliance on the ful­fil­ment indus­try to get prod­ucts into the hands of con­sumers. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, because con­sumers are demand­ing faster, free deliv­ery and speedy returns for their pur­chas­es, the industry’s response has been to push untrained ware­house staff to walk fur­ther and work hard­er in repet­i­tive, man­u­al roles.

At the same time, to cre­ate cost sav­ings and make free deliv­ery more viable, many ful­fil­ment com­pa­nies have moved to replace human prob­lem-solv­ing and per­son­alised ser­vice with crude automa­tion and basic robot­ics. All that’s left for the human employ­ees is monot­o­nous and unful­fill­ing work, which is why the indus­try is blight­ed by an increas­ing­ly dis­sat­is­fied and tran­sient work­force – to the detri­ment of qual­i­ty, effi­cien­cy and cus­tomer ser­vice.

Con­se­quent­ly, ecom­merce providers are find­ing them­selves unable to speak to anoth­er human when they need to resolve a press­ing ful­fil­ment prob­lem, try out a new sales chan­nel or intro­duce a new prod­uct line. Not only is this a frus­trat­ing day-to-day expe­ri­ence, but it is also sti­fling inno­va­tion, as retail­ers reg­u­lar­ly find them­selves bat­tling a ‘com­put­er says no’ mind­set.

Thank­ful­ly, one UK-head­quar­tered ful­fil­ment com­pa­ny, Huboo, is bold­ly buck­ing the trend and turn­ing the ful­fil­ment mod­el on its head. The com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed a micro-hub mod­el that repli­cates the func­tion­al­i­ty of a com­plete ware­house with­in as lit­tle as a few hun­dred square feet. It gives ware­house employ­ees the free­dom to work quick­ly and intel­li­gent­ly on a set client port­fo­lio, under­tak­ing more engag­ing, var­ied and empow­er­ing work, while ben­e­fit­ting retail­ers by ensur­ing they deal with the same ware­house team mem­bers each time.

“More reward­ing ware­house roles make for hap­pi­er humans, which has huge ben­e­fits for the retail­ers we serve. Unlike tra­di­tion­al ware­house roles, our employ­ees have real respon­si­bil­i­ty. They know a retailer’s prod­uct offer­ing inside and out, mean­ing that they can spot any prob­lems with prod­ucts arriv­ing into the hub and work with retail­ers direct­ly to solve any issues they face,” says Mar­tin Bysh, CEO and co-founder at Huboo.

“What’s more, our human-cen­tred approach allows us to offer bespoke kit­ting and pack­ag­ing require­ments across even the most diverse prod­uct lines, mean­ing we can adapt and flex to meet the needs of side hus­tlers and estab­lished large-scale busi­ness­es alike.”

A cru­cial dif­fer­en­tia­tor between Huboo and tra­di­tion­al ful­fil­ment com­pa­nies is that, rather than striv­ing to replace human work­ers, Huboo applies tech­nol­o­gy to enhance the effec­tive­ness of its employ­ees.

“We use tech­nol­o­gy to empow­er our work­ers to take own­er­ship of their roles and enjoy more mean­ing­ful day-to-day work. We turn to robots for the man­u­al, repet­i­tive tasks that we know aren’t reward­ing for staff, such as stock check­ing or mov­ing inven­to­ry out of deep stor­age onto the ware­house floor,” adds Mar­tin.

Huboo’s busi­ness mod­el suc­cess­ful­ly chal­lenges the assump­tion that machines can out-pace and out-think humans in a ware­hous­ing envi­ron­ment and demon­strates that over-reliance on tech­nol­o­gy is not a smart way to dri­ve cost and time effi­cien­cies. The supe­ri­or pre­ci­sion of human work­ers is shown by Huboo’s pick­ing accu­ra­cy rates of 99.9%, sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than the indus­try aver­age. The company’s human-cen­tric approach puts its peo­ple at the heart of its ware­hous­ing strat­e­gy, aug­ment­ed by great tech­nol­o­gy, and it is the com­bi­na­tion of these fac­tors that keeps Huboo’s logis­tics costs com­pet­i­tive.

Huboo’s bot­tom line is proof of the suc­cess of this approach – the com­pa­ny is tipped to become a future Uni­corn, with its val­u­a­tion pre­dict­ed to exceed $1bn lat­er this year. In lit­tle over a year it has increased its UK foot­print and opened in three new coun­tries — and is eye­ing fur­ther glob­al expan­sion in 2022. But its suc­cess is per­haps best reflect­ed in its client churn rates, which have remained con­sis­tent­ly near zero from day one – a remark­able achieve­ment in a logis­tics indus­try renowned for its high client dis­sat­is­fac­tion and low reten­tion.

To find out more, vis­it huboo.com

Pro­mot­ed by Huboo