Warehousing in general will have to adapt to the following 10 major industry trends - Selin Karahan

Warehousing in general will have to adapt to the following 10 major industry trends:

1. Overall inventory reduction. Holding inventory means costs and reduction of space in warehouses. Companies trade off with costs of holding inventory or order cost. They should alter the density of their storage and decide that how much inventory they should keep in their warehouses. The aim is minimize the inventory level.

2. Greater pressure on employees. Growing warehouses means that employees must be more productive and working hours are longer than before . These situation create a pressure on employees. Also, when warehouses capacities increase, it is more complex to employees. Some of the warehouse staff move on to less stressful jobs. Management needs to understand these dynamics and proactively work to avoid their damaging effects.

3. Increased investment in material handling systems.

System design: should be arranged that provide flexibility, modularity, and agility.

They can use to automatic sorting systems , automatic handling systems.

Example of automatic handling equipment

Example of automatic sorting systems

Vendor selection: orders should be fulfilled correctly so material handling systems works more efficiently.

4. More cross-docking. Companies should adapt their warehouses for cross-docking activities.

5. Wider use of logistics service providers. Comapanies should analyze their core competencies and focus on their core activities and should use logistics service providers for their logistic activities.

6. Less predictability. Today and future , forecasting will become so difficult so warehouses should be became more agile and had responsiveness for uncertainity instead of forecasting future demand.

7. Major changes to order profiles. Companies should use other channells for capturing the customers such as, e-business, direct-to-store and they should adapt their warehouses for orders for other channells.

8. Increasing demand for value-added activities. Warehouses should be increased to value added activities such as , special packaging, labelling, kitting.

9. Growing recognition of warehousing's role in the supply chain. Warehousing activities become more important in supply chain. Warehouses provide a connecton between manufacturers to customers and provide value added activities. Today, customers more focus on value added activities. And also, storage is more important for avoiding stockout.

10. More mergers and acquisitions. Almost all companies aim’s is minimizing the inventory level so they also aim that minimize the number of warehouses with mergers and acquisitions. Companies should analyze the process and optimize their distribution network with the analyzing customers network and transportation costs.