Boot Barn is a retail chain devoted to western and work-related footwear, apparel, and accessories. The company operates over 200 stores in the US and e-commerce websites consisting primarily of bootbarn.com, sheplers.com and countryoutfitter.com. The company also operates store support and distribution centers in California and Kansas. The Wichita, Kansas facility supports the company’s expanding […]
In December of 2019, the global grocery retailer Ahold Delhaize announced it was investing $480 million to transform and expand its US supply chain operations to support a strategy to transition the supply chain network into a fully-integrated, self-distribution model. My colleague Steve Banker published an informative article in 2020 about this extensive initiative Ahold […]
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mike Khodl, VP of Differentiated Technologies at Dematic. We spoke mostly about achieving optimal warehouse performance. However, we discussed a number of key subtopics, beginning with the role of software intelligence in automated warehouses as a strategic value driver, and the critical role it plays in in […]
Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Markus Schmidt, President of Swisslog Americas, about warehousing in today’s environment of rapid and often unpredictable change. The coronavirus pandemic exerted widespread impact on order fulfillment operations. But even prior to the pandemic, warehousing and fulfillment were evolving rapidly due to a number of factors, most […]
Merchandise fulfillment variability has been on the rise for a number of years, due in large part to the growth of e-commerce. But all bets were off in 2020 as variability went off the charts. As you can see from the two included images charting the quarterly change in US e-commerce sales (year over year) […]
No question – logistics challenges have increased since the rise of e-commerce and the number of products on the market started to multiply. For this reason, supply chain solutions have become an integral part of business strategies to cope with these ever-increasing complexities. However, there is the difficult question of which technology to implement to […]
The Robotic Industries Association (RIA) hosted its virtual Autonomous Mobile Robot Conference earlier this week (October 26 – 27). I personally kicked off research on the global mobile warehouse robotics market earlier this month and therefore chose to attend conference sessions that provided insights on the broader context of mobile warehouse robotics, namely the concepts of ecosystems, integration, and interoperability. Autonomous mobile robot (AMR) interoperability as a concept found its way into many sessions but it was the main topic of the session presentation by Aaron Prather of FedEx. A unifying architecture as the mechanism to scale AMR adoption…
