Logistics is the movement of goods through the supply chain. Products are shipped to numerous places from the manufacturer to the end customer, and many places in between. This requires a warehouse management system (WMS) that retrieves and shares business intelligence in the warehouse.
The market has been experiencing a transition from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce. By looking at the success of one of the biggest e-commerce platforms Amazon, the future of the market is likely to shift to platforms that are easily accessible and open 24/7/365 days a year. This market transition presents an opportunity for the warehouse industry to grow.
While global supply chains are still recovering from the pandemic, soaring energy prices, high inflation rates, and pressing sustainability targets bring new challenges. So, what comes next? How will the supply chain industry cope with the difficulties? And what is on the horizon for warehouse management? On the following pages, we will discuss four trends that we believe will significantly impact warehouse operations. Some of these are already emerging, and some will become more prevalent in the coming years, but one thing is for sure all will influence how we run warehouses in the future.
The pandemic has turbocharged adoption of digital commerce. After surging by 42% in 2020, total U.S. e-commerce sales increased by another 18% in 2021, to $960 billion, according to adjusted figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Even with e-commerce sales growing at a blistering pace, they only represented about 14% of total retail sales in the first quarter of 2022 – meaning we’re still in the early innings of adoption. To put it in perspective, eMarketer projected that 46.3% of total retail sales in China will come from digital channels in 2022.
The global food and grocery retail market will reach $14.6 Trillion by 2026, with Online
grocery revenue to surpass $1 Trillion by 2026. But empty shelves, growing food prices,
and labor shortages have highlighted the fragility of the global supply chain.
According to research from ABI Research. That’s why suppliers, distributors, and retailers are turning to digital transformations to cater to a rapidly growing market for end-to-end visibility and operational efficiency.
When looking at the warehouse and logistics landscape, we see that everything is changing. Consumers expect greater product variety, order flexibility, quicker delivery, and easy returns. This trend is not going away, forcing business models and logistics processes to adapt to new demands of higher throughput and faster deliveries.
The Motor carriers act of 1980 resulted in an increase in the number of trucking carriers in the USA. Companies that used to provide warehousing services exclusively started to expand their footprint in the whole supply chain and emerged as freight movers. The number of companies providing both storage and transportation, and the advent of information technology created the space for third-party-logistics companies (3PL).
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