Better, Not Bigger: Addressing Unpredictable Markets and Fluctuating E-commerce Demand
Covariant is a Business Reporter client.
Over the last few years, retailers have experienced explosive e-commerce growth, and their logistics teams have scrambled to keep up with demand while juggling painful delays, disruptions and shutdowns.
Although sales continue to be at historical highs, demand has dipped slightly over the last few quarters. The tension between volatile consumer spending habits and retailers’ desire for preparedness creates a challenging atmosphere—not to mention the ongoing pressure from a lack of available workers to staff shipping and fulfilment centers.
These factors have combined to force retail leaders to change the way they invest in retail logistics. Continuing to pursue capital-heavy strategies like warehouse construction and hiring pushes could be catastrophically risky for a company, as they’re heavily dependent upon the economy and labor markets continuing to grow at previous rates—something that can’t be guaranteed.
So, how do retailers gain control in characteristically unpredictable times? Our team at Covariant, a leading AI robotics company, spends a lot of time helping retailers and their logistics partners answer this very question.
The bottom line is that rather than building bigger, you should be building higher-performing, more efficient e-commerce fulfilment operations.
The rise of AI-powered automation for retail logistics
Modern warehouse facilities are expensive to build, but the truth is that most are still rather inefficient. While many processes have been automated, the pick-and-place parts of the fulfillment process are still predominantly manual, accounting for 50% or more of labor costs.
Traditional robots cannot automate these processes due to the adaptability required to handle the infinite variability found in a modern warehouse; think of the highly dynamic nature of products—the shape, size, type of packaging, seasonality of items, etc. Automation of the picking of these items must be powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Leveraging autonomous robotics in pick-and-place applications used to be just a pipe dream, but this is now a reality due to recent advancements in deep neural net machine learning. In a survey done earlier this year, one in four supply chain leaders are already using or are in the process of adopting such automation technologies.
Now is the time for you to build better and more efficient warehouses with modern technology like AI robotics. The rising retailer adoption rate of AI-powered automation is reflecting this shift, and you don’t want to be left behind.
Investing in AI-powered robotic automation is enabling retailers and their logistics providers to address fluctuating e-commerce demand and unpredictable markets with improved throughput and efficiency. In the video above, learn how these systems are autonomously fulfilling thousands of online customer orders a day, with a 99.9% accuracy rate, and how you can get started.
Learn how AI robotics improves the performance and efficiency of your operations.
This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.
Image: iStock id1349338733
