The results of this year’s Warehouse Operations & Trends Survey are in! Every year, Peerless Research Group (PRG) conducts a survey on behalf of Logistics Management and sister publication Modern Materials Handling to inquire about operational factors at warehouses and DCs. The questions concern topics like size of the DC network, number of employees, average annual inventory turns, use of temporary labor, strategies for coping with peak demand, and other challenges such as finding and retaining labor. Once the answers have been collected, top industry experts like St. Onge Company’s Don Derewecki and Norm Saenz are called in to analyze and discuss the results.
In recent years, a common theme among those surveyed has been rising budgets for facility automation and struggles with maintaining a strong labor force. This year saw more moderate increases in facility budgets, perhaps in response to rising interest rates. Other trends included an increase in e-commerce and wholesale and a decline in retail channels. Bulk purchasing is up, perhaps as a result of supply chain disruption worries, which was a leading issue in the survey results.
“There does seem to be a more cautious approach this year, which could be tied to concerns about rising interest rates,” says Derewecki. “But in the grand scheme of things, from what we see in the industry, many organizations are still spending on automation. Some might not be buying major new systems today, but they want to know where the technology is going and what it can do in their operations, because in the long term, there just aren’t enough workers who want to pick cartons and cases all day to meet order fulfillment needs.”
Click here to read the article on the Logistics Management site!
