For years, fashion retailers have faced mounting pressures from both customers and employees to evolve. Considering the holistic logistics industry, and within it the warehousing sector, this industry and its verticals have been late to automate in comparison to dynamically growing tech industries, with traditional automation only gaining momentum in the early 2000s. More recently, there’s been a strong urgency expressed for automation and robotics by fashion retailers for better throughput of parcels from warehouses to parcel carriers.
The demand for robotics and automation across retail logistics is pushed further by the ever-growing global fashion and ecommerce market value. By 2025, the value is said to reach well over $1.2 trillion. Despite the growing market, labor is in short supply and the warehouse workforce is facing increased pressures to keep up with customer demand stemming from online shopping, all while facing mental and physical strain from an already demanding industry.
To alleviate pressures on the workforce, automation and robotics have become a necessity across logistics more so than a desire. The latest labor data from the U.S., for example, shows that more workers are willing to walk away from their jobs or to switch employment. As the data states, by the end of September 2022, the largest increases in job openings were in transportation, warehousing, and utilities (+111,000).
What does this mean for retail?
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The labor shortage is hitting the retail industry hard on two fronts. Firstly, the distribution centers and secondly the stores. Focusing on distribution centers, employee availability at the retail level remains a persistent challenge for supply chains to overcome congestion of goods at the warehouse and parcel shipment centers. This slows down production, causing inventory stockouts for parcel distributors and retailers. In turn, the shortage of available labor directly impacts the ability to move goods between different parties involved in the supply chain.
Vacancies and elevated resignation rates suggest that retailers would potentially need to increase employee salaries and/or benefits to retain the physical workforce given the current impact of worker turnover on morale, skills development, employee mental health and customer satisfaction. Adding to the pressure is the notion that younger generations are rejecting physically strenuous tasks, with warehouses and distribution centers experiencing this firsthand.
Retail employees on the backend are faced with more labor-intensive work as consumers are showing a greater preference for online shopping. Along with the boom in online shopping, as more retail activity shifts to ecommerce, fashion retailers in particular are faced with new responsibilities in order fulfillment. From parcel sorting, order picking, palletizing and shipping, repetitive and time-consuming tasks to ship orders from the warehouse are increasing.
Robotics Alleviating Pressures on the Existing Workforce
Considering the fashion sector within the holistic scope of logistics, modern automation of the industry is still in its infancy and questions remain over the ethics and risks of robotic fulfillment for fashion, especially given the high cost of implementation.
That being said, warehousing, final assembly, and production are three main areas where robotics will be the most beneficial for retailers to ensure a smooth logistics process. With consumer preference for online shopping taking the front seat, implementing robotics in these areas can increase productivity, improve the collection of data to better predict order fluxes and decrease the risk of hazardous tasks for improved efficiency and safer work environments.
Employees’ time can be freed up for other important tasks if repetitive labors are automated or robotized. Not only this, but order sorting and accuracy of parcel shipments will improve. A study by Harvard Business Review found that warehouse workers show great optimism for higher performance and efficiency brought about by automated systems, not only benefitting the overall safety of the workplace but also leading to a higher quality of work. Making changes in the warehouse to support the labor force is also predicted to bring about greater customer satisfaction due to fewer sorting errors and faster shipments.
Alongside investing in better time-spent for employees, one of the biggest issues within retail and ecommerce is timely delivery. Implementing robotics, AI and automation across warehouses has been shown to significantly improve delivery schedules. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 75% of retail supply chain leaders made 2-day delivery a priority and 42% are aiming for same-day delivery. This would require smarter investments in automated solutions to lessen the pressures placed on employees to up warehouse throughput.
What about the influx of order sorting and shipping due to heightened customer demands?
With the advent of microfulfillment operations, warehouse employees already need to handle more parcels in smaller batches. This is where robotics come into play to support workers. Typically, automated solutions are utilized to optimize worker productivity in the order fulfillment process by decreasing inefficiencies, improving worker ergonomics and enhancing workplace quality.
Warehouses can find it challenging to stay flexible when needing to keep up with overwhelming volumes of parcels to pick and sort for shipment. The industry is well aware that spikes in online parcel orders lead to performance pressures across logistics. Ensuring frictionless warehouse operations can cause great mental strain for employees, especially when faced with growing customer demands, which is only heightened by ecommerce sales.
This is not an issue the typical conveyor belt or traditional automation systems can solve for the workforce. Luckily, industrial robots and collaborative robots (cobots) are now more intuitive, agile and flexible in their workings. Huge advancements have been made in vision, motion and task planning technologies, making these types of systems more cooperative in supporting the human workforce to accommodate order influxes of parcels moving through fulfillment centers.
Using robotic systems on the work floor to enhance productivity can lead to increased mental capacity for employees as well. A critical industry move needed to be made, especially during the crises of labor shortages. Automating activities such as the picking and placing of items eliminates production bottlenecks whilst increasing employee morale and productivity.
In Conclusion
As online ordering volume continues to exponentially grow for all retailers, the lack of availability of human labor continues to be a significant challenge. However, by adding powerful automation tools to help the existing workforce improve overall productivity, up capacity, improve mental health and help meet customer expectations, a frictionless supply chain experience can be achieved. Adopting automation in the warehouse will also contribute toward making the fulfillment of customer demand a delightful experience for all parties involved across logistics.
Smart Robotics founder and CTO Heico Sandee holds a PhD degree and previously acted as program manager for robotics at Eindhoven University of Technology. With more than 15 years of experience in robotics development, Sandee now leads Smart Robotics in developing intelligent, robot-independent software for flexible deployment of automated solutions. Smart Robotics’ pick and place robotic systems are designed to improve reliability of warehouse operations, increase capacity, and to alleviate the pressures of the labor shortage across Logistics. The pick and place systems help improve working conditions for floor workers by taking over repetitive and physically strenuous tasks such as order picking, packing, palletizing and sorting.
