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…
ARC Advisory Group’s 2020 update to its global warehouse automation market shows Dematic, Knapp, and SSI Schaefer as the 2019 market share leaders. Accelerating warehouse automation demand from e-commerce growth is propelling market growth. This year’s research includes additional five year forecasts for hardware by equipment category (subsystems), hardware by load size, and retail by type.
My first introduction to Kindred AI occurred at the Manhattan Associates booth at Promat 2019. There I learned about the company’s partnerships with automation vendors and the forthcoming Manhattan Automation Network certification. As I stated back in 2019, I found the partnership with Kindred and the integration with Kindred Sort particularly interesting. I had the opportunity to speak with Kindred AI’s CEO, Marin Tchakarov earlier this month and jumped on the opportunity to discuss the details of this company’s offering and exciting journey. Marin, what capabilities do you believe differentiate your solution from others that I have seen on display at trade shows and […]
The warehouse automation market the market didn’t grow as much in 2019 as I had expected, while 2020 is looking better than I had anticipated. Warehouse automation demand from most direct-to-consumer channels remained active, with some growing very rapidly. Furthermore, warehouse automation suppliers went into 2020 with a substantial backlog of orders to buffer any short-term decrease in demand for project business, but […]
In April I discussed the widespread impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on supply chain and fulfillment, and provided a WMS market update in which I predicted a market downturn in 2020 to be followed by a rebound in 2021. During the process of developing my WMS market forecast, I made assumptions for each quarter of […]
