Talk around automation and attendant industry 4.0 innovations is dominating talk-shop discourse but warehousing will always need people, even when the 4th industrial revolution is well on its way.
According to Martin Bailey, chairman of Industrial Logistics Systems, the future role of humans in an increasingly robotised arena has become evident as the likes of Amazon, one of the consumer market’s stellar risers and vanguard brand of disruptive distribution, still relies heavily on ability that has a heartbeat behind it.
Foregrounding a presentation where a series of slides showed the latest and greatest in the mass-packing space, he pointed out an Amazon warehouse in the States that in terms of hangarsize scope was plain for all to see. And yet the staff complement at the company that catapulted Jeff Bezos to becoming the world’s wealthiest person, dwarfs the size of the company’s facilities.
“Even in Amazon’s industry you need a lot of people to go and fetch something,” Bailey said as he remarked that Bezos’s business had 380 000 people on its payroll. With 38 warehouses in America alone, only four have seen the introduction of “little robots ferrying shelves around” since 2012.
His entertaining man-onthe-street presentation style and affable input on the highs and lows of warehousing trends attracted a full house at Goscor Group which made the talk possible. Huddled inside an Ekurhuleni warehouse as unseasonally chilly weather closed in, Bailey reminded the audience that flesh-and-blood input would always have a role to play in warehousing.
He mentioned how British retailer Sainsbury’s had embarked on a secret warehousing automation exercise that had flopped in catastrophic fashion. “They were all switched on at the same time to create a kind of ‘big bang’ effect and it was absolute chaos.
“It was clear that whoever designed the system had no idea of retail because goods like bread, baked beans, milk and more all came off the conveyor belt at the same time and ended up all mixed together as the trolleys were wheeled into stores.”
Bailey said it had taken about 6000 people to try to unscramble the resulting disaster of Sainsbury’s hifalutin automation mess. Although reiterating the role of greater integration as industry 4.0 juggernauts along, Bailey argued that a lot of the integration was of the man and machine kind.
“Successful warehouses,” he said, “are not about automation, it’s about team effort where everyone is working together in the same way. “Half the problem in half the warehouses is that a whole lot of people working in warehousing are simply not suited to the environment they are working in.”
Successful warehouses are not about automation, it’s about team effort. – Martin Bailey
