Businesses of all types are continuing to learn valuable lessons in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be tempting to think that a lot of this information is simply related to how we can better react to future pandemics, but in fact many of these lessons can be applied more generally. Many of the issues that distribution centers and warehouses experienced during COVID, such as labor shortages and disruptions, will remain foundational challenges in the future. Many of the solutions and strategies that proved useful during the pandemic are now becoming the norm industry-wide. Our focus at DMW&H is offering our customers proactive solutions to these types of problems, and using the difficult experiences of the past three years to chart a more efficient path forward.
REACTIONS
As we all no doubt remember, the pandemic was all about reacting to new situations. Businesses, politicians, the general public—everyone was simply forced to react to new information on a daily basis and make the best decisions that they could. In the world of distribution centers, this was akin to watching businesses go through repeated (and unexpected) stress tests. Warehouses were forced to deal with labor shortages, then perhaps supply chain disruptions, then it could be new health and safety regulations. Addressing any of these challenges proactively was extremely difficult because things were changing so swiftly and unexpectedly. There may, however, be a silver lining. These stress tests forced warehouse operations to take a look at the weak points in their businesses, ones that may not have been easily seen before. Prior to the pandemic, many in the DC space simply addressed issues as they arose. In the end, the industry learned an important lesson about the value of proactive planning and taking the initiative before challenges are forced upon you.
NEW STRATEGIES
We mentioned before that solving labor issues continues to be a top priority for efficient warehouse management. The upward trend in wages and benefits for human workers continues to rise alongside the increasing capabilities of automation. Over the last ten years, we have started to see a changeover where the tasks that can be performed by autonomous mobile robots have expanded, as the software and hardware behind this technology continues to mature. While lots of businesses were scrambling to address this labor/automation issue during the pandemic, others were better prepared because they had started to implement solutions proactively. Moving forward, the strategies we offer our clients at DMW&H will focus on unique solutions to strengthen the distribution process from disruption. This means relying more on business-wide systems integration, and building out systems redundancy where it might be needed in the future. As more and more machines get brought into the labor loop moving forward, the communications networks between these individual systems will be subject to stress tests of their own. These challenges will take shape differently than the pandemic did, but the same strategies of proactive planning can still be used to ship and receive goods in a resilient way.
