Returnless refunds is only one of many ways in which Amazon is taking e-commerce fulfillment and customer service to the next level. To remain competitive, robust fuflillment capabilities are a necessity, and resposiveness and other customer service capabilities are a valuable diferentiator in today’s intensely competitive retail environment.
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Archive for Warehouse Management Systems
What’s the operational and strategic value of robotics? This question is more important now than ever, as businesses look to robotics to overcome labor challenges and increase operational flexibility. Flexibility is a strategic concept summarizing the elasticity a warehouse needs to adapt to market changes and skyrocketing consumer expectations. Helping to address flexibility in the warehouse is the newer robotics market for autonomous mobile robots (AMR). This technology is extending the capabilities of warehouses, people, […]
Read More →Micro-fulfillment center automation is poised for rapid growth. Customer proximity, throughput, responsiveness, and space utilization are critical factors for success. Innovative companies are addressing the micro-fulfillment challenge with cutting-edge technology and process innovations. Front and center is a number of automation technologies that can be categorized as a hybrid of shuttle system and robotic technologies.
Read More →One area of interest in today’s end-to-end supply chain is machine learning. And this is certainly a topic that we have written about quite often. Over the last few months, Steve Banker, Clint Reiser, and I have written about artificial intelligence and machine learning in a number of contexts and how it impacts the supply chain. These topics have included transportation management, warehouse management, and supply chain planning, among others. This technology continues to be […]
Read More →Fulfillment repsonsiveness is the warehouse capability most expected to increase in importance over the next five years, according to the results from our best practices survey of logistics executives. A full 77 percent of respondents expect it to become even more important than it is in today’s fast-paced environment. I attribute this increasing importance to consumer expectations for next day delivery, driven the new “Amazon Effect.”
Read More →Digital Innovation in the Modern Warehouse was the topic at this session of the 3PL and Supply Chain Summit. Executives from HighJump, SSI Schaefer, and Pepperl+Fuchs provided valuable insights on sensor types and their applications, the synthesis of this data into meaningful, actionable information, and the use of digital technology to drive productivity improvements.
Read More →ARC Advisory Group just published an update to its annual warehouse management systems (WMS) market study. The recent analysis shows that e-commerce continues to exert its influence on WMS market growth. However, there is a notable shift in the market pressures and the profiles of companies purchasing WMS to support their fulfillment operations. For example, pressures from expedited delivery and the subtle shift in demand from soft goods to hard line items, such as grocery, and particularly prominent.
Read More →WMS product development roadmaps vary by provider, but there is substantial overlap among the development initiatives of leading WMS providers. Key topics include machine learning, optimization, automation integration, and interoperability. This article captures the “essence of the essence” of the development plans of the leadings WMS suppliers today.
Read More →US warehousing and storage industry (3PL) employment grew from 779 million in January 2015 to 1.2 billion in December 2018, a CAGR of 11% from 2015 through 2018. At the same time, US unemployment is at historic lows. This suggests that the warehousing and storage industry must hire workers from other industries. Stories about individual warehouses paints a picture of high demand for labor, low availability, and high turnover rates. Something has to “give”.
Read More →HighJump, a global provider of supply chain solutions, wrapped up its annual user conference, HighJump Elevate, last week. HighJump is a leading provider of warehouse management systems (WMS), but their solution portfolio is broader.
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