New Developments in Material Handling

Logistics Transportation Review | Tuesday, August 23, 2022

As material handling industries observe radical transformation, new distribution strategies and technologies are required to meet the challenges of today and to adapt to the unforeseen changes of the future.

FREMONT, CA: There is a significant degree of concern surrounding the material handling industry due to the persistent presence of coronavirus disease. However, the market cannot wait for that uncertainty to disappear before making the investments necessary to allow supply chains to adapt to market changes. Therefore, warehouse owners and their automation partners need to make a greater effort to embrace emerging new trends.

Item Picking Advances Upstream

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Smaller order sizes have been a trend recently, and this trend will continue in the coming years as centralised pallet and case warehouses start to include individual item picking into their business practices. The ongoing transformation of the retail environment and manufacturers' transition to direct-to-consumer sales will be the driving forces behind this development.

There will be transformations in many warehouses as they integrate new processes and technologies for efficient item picking. Warehouses will include goods-to-person technologies such as cube-based automated storage and retrieval systems and autonomous robots. This will lead to an acceleration in the embrace of robotic item picking systems.

Moreover, this technology has the potential to fully automate the picking process, which will provide benefits for product handling operations. Robotic integration will help with labour shortage challenges and cost pressures. New generation robotic picking solutions are expanding the ability to pick more products and offer excellent operational reliability with more sophisticated gripping vision technologies.

Grocery Stores Crystalise MFC Strategies

The impact of COVID-19 on embracing e-grocery is very evident. Although it has dropped, demand for e-grocery services is still significantly more than what grocery stores anticipated it to be just two years ago. The same trend observed in other e-commerce markets is also seen in the e-grocery sector. The difference is that, unlike other e-commerce applications, fulfilment periods for online grocery orders are measured in minutes or hours rather than days. As consumers include online grocery shopping in their daily routines, tolerance for extended fulfilment periods has diminished.

This has rendered manual in-store fulfilment impractical in many places for large volume retailers. Picking up in-store inefficient expenses causes congestion and alienates in-store customers. A majority of the market used the pandemic period to gain a better understanding of the complexities of e-grocery fulfilment and implement the organisational changes necessary to support a micro-fulfilment centre (MFC) strategy in the future. While a few large grocers have made the switch to automated micro-fulfilment centres (MFCs) and e-fulfilment centres (EFCs) to enable efficient order fulfilment close to consumers.

Furthermore, those businesses will develop trust in the MFC concepts that have been implemented through the advantageous experience of early adopters. They now have answers to critical questions that were preventing wider adoption, such as which distribution strategy is best suited for specific environments, the number of e-groceries required to make MFCs cost-effective, and the automation technology that can provide the balance of density, throughput, and reliability that MFCs require.

Every major grocer will decide their e-grocery strategy shortly, and many will shift into the execution phase using MFC automation. Early adopters will start using MFCs on a larger scale and derive benefits from streamlined installation as solutions that have been improved through pilot programmes are replicated throughout the distribution network.

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