Fast-tracking the future warehouse

The tra­di­tion­al vision of the future ware­house, where shiny drones zip up and down high bays, speedy robots pick goods with humanoid arms and staff nav­i­gate aisles with advanced smart glass­es, is cer­tain­ly both a com­pelling and fea­si­ble prospect. But has the unfore­seen arrival of a pan­dem­ic threat­ened the evo­lu­tion of this sup­ply chain utopia?

The acceleration of warehouse technology

The short answer is no. New require­ments in place to curb the spread of the coro­n­avirus, such as social dis­tanc­ing and reduced labour forces, along­side the need to han­dle snow­balling demand, have actu­al­ly accel­er­at­ed invest­ment in the future ware­house, with all its tech-pow­ered bells and whis­tles.

Sup­ply chains have had no choice but to rely on smart tech­nol­o­gy to ensure bet­ter stan­dards of hygiene, fill the labour gap and cope with increased inven­to­ry lev­els.

“The ramp-up of inno­va­tion we’ve seen over the past six months prompt­ed by COVID-19 would in nor­mal times have tak­en years,” says Ian Keilty, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer at Win­can­ton. “Hav­ing expe­ri­enced both sup­ply and demand shocks, many cus­tomers are look­ing to tech­nol­o­gy to make their sup­ply chains more respon­sive, par­tic­u­lar­ly to meet increased online demand.”

Technologies of the future warehouse

Exist­ing trends, which have been mag­ni­fied by the pan­dem­ic, hint at the kind of tech­nolo­gies like­ly to shape the future ware­house.

“There was already a move away from util­is­ing core labour to car­ry out some of the more indi­rect activ­i­ty in the ware­house envi­ron­ment, such as mov­ing emp­ty pal­lets or pal­let lay­er­ing, and the pan­dem­ic has increased the focus in this area,” says Angela Howard, vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions, retail and con­sumer, at DHL Sup­ply Chain. “For exam­ple, we’re look­ing at robot­ic arms and autonomous trucks to sup­port and work along­side our ware­house col­leagues.”

She says that from a safe­ty point of view, the future ware­house is expect­ed to con­tin­ue to focus more on tech­nolo­gies that enable social dis­tanc­ing, such as robot­ics, automa­tion, wide­spread use of sen­sors and the inter­net of things. 

“Sim­i­lar­ly, in the man­u­fac­tur­ing space, we are see­ing new tech­nolo­gies like ful­ly auto­mat­ic very nar­row aisle robot­ics being intro­duced, which can pick and put away full pal­lets with­out any human resource, allow­ing space in the ware­house to be max­imised, and health and safe­ty risk min­imised,” says Howard.

Oca­do has relied on data from ware­house man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy to han­dle increased demand. “While demand at the height of lock­down was off the chart, our Erith [south-east Lon­don] facil­i­ty ramped up to process over 110,000 orders a week, com­pared with 80,000 just a few months ear­li­er,” says Alex Har­vey, engi­neer­ing direc­tor for han­dling robot­ics at Oca­do Tech­nol­o­gy. “We used our ware­house sys­tem data for quick, adap­tive deci­sion-mak­ing to squeeze new lev­els of opti­mi­sa­tion out of things like van space.”

Dur­ing lock­down the com­pa­ny tem­porar­i­ly delist­ed bot­tled water, which is heavy and bulky, enabling Ocado.com to make 6,000 more deliv­er­ies a week. 

“There is increased inter­est in tech­nolo­gies that make exist­ing ware­hous­es smarter, such as robots that can trav­el safe­ly around ware­hous­es and work with the peo­ple in those envi­ron­ments to get more prod­uct through the same space, rather than hav­ing to invest in a brand new site before mak­ing a start on build­ing the ware­house of the future,” says Keilty. “We are work­ing with our cus­tomers to use arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence on the increas­ing amounts of data to make the deci­sions about when and where the ware­hous­es of the future need to be.” 

Win­can­ton is also look­ing at dig­i­tal twins, or dig­i­tal repli­cas, of the sup­ply chain.  “With dig­i­tal twins we can ask ques­tions of the data and eval­u­ate dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing strate­gies before invest­ing tens or even hun­dreds of mil­lions of pounds in future sup­ply chains,” he says.

Team management, flexible working & collaboration

Not all the impacts of COVID-19 on the future ware­house relate to futur­is­tic equip­ment or flashy dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. The pan­dem­ic is also like­ly to prompt a whole new way of address­ing team man­age­ment and engage­ment.

“Aside from the advances in robot­ics, automa­tion and smart tech­nol­o­gy that will no doubt con­tin­ue, we expect to see the future ware­house to look very dif­fer­ent in terms of the struc­ture of the day and the over­all approach to flex­i­bil­i­ty and shift pat­terns,” says Howard.

COVID-19 has encour­aged busi­ness­es to think dif­fer­ent­ly about how they man­age their work­force, includ­ing how they think about tal­ent engage­ment and train­ing. DHL has seen an accel­er­a­tion in the adop­tion of new inno­va­tions in response to this.

“The pan­dem­ic has allowed the world of work as a whole to see how things might be done dif­fer­ent­ly, with flex­i­ble work­ing now adopt­ed far and wide, and many enjoy­ing a much-improved work-life bal­ance as a result,” adds Howard. “The same can be true for those work­ing in ware­hous­es, whether that might be look­ing at two-hour shifts, chang­ing the shift pat­terns offered to peo­ple or flex­ing and adapt­ing the pat­terns to suit each employ­ee.”

Anoth­er like­ly fea­ture of the future ware­house is space shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Tony Man­nix, chief exec­u­tive of Clip­per Logis­tics, expects increased col­lab­o­ra­tion and part­ner­ships in a post-pan­dem­ic world, with ded­i­cat­ed shared-user ware­house and trans­port solu­tions that can pro­vide cost-effi­cient ware­hous­ing and advanced stock man­age­ment sys­tems

“This could allow phys­i­cal and online retail to run seam­less­ly along­side each oth­er, cre­at­ing new routes to mar­ket and com­pet­i­tive costs, and pro­vides scal­a­bil­i­ty, while reduc­ing con­ges­tion and final-mile deliv­er­ies,” he con­cludes.