What does the year 2022 hold for automation, especially in the logistics, supply chain and ecommerce industry? George Konidaris, CTO and co-founder, Realtime Robotics, discusses in detail the future of the adoption of automation in these industries.
Automation is one of the buzzwords of this past year, for two reasons: one, technology and processes have advanced far enough that it is becoming affordable and manageable to purchase and deploy automated solutions in a wide range of businesses; and two, the pandemic and resulting trends of remote work, hybrid work, labor shortages and the “great resignation†have all combined to rekindle interest from corporations in determining which tasks have become cost-effective to automate.
In the next year or two, I believe that we’ll see much more widespread adoption of automation in industries such as logistics and warehousing. Accompanying this will be a wave of new applications of more flexible, smarter robots in manufacturing and heavy industry. This will, in turn, enable businesses to address the labor shortage by eliminating dull and repetitive tasks and attracting employees with the promise of more autonomy and higher-level responsibilities.
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Increased Pressure To Automate
Pressure on the logistics industry to support the recent massive growth in ecommerce has really ratcheted up in the last two years and will not go away any time soon. The pandemic was the final domino that converted millions of people’s default expectation from in-person shopping (for most goods) to ecommerce, and the relaxation of lockdown rules hasn’t really reversed that. As a result, the volume of goods that must be moved in and out of warehouses and to consumers is unprecedented. Combine this with labor shortages and how lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of businesses that require actual physical labor,where people are concentrated in one space to remain operating. It’s easy to see why automation has become a board-level concern at companies.
Volume brings with it an increased pressure on successful throughput: there’s a huge need for automation in this space to enable it to keep up with demand, but that automation can’t be slow. With all of this in mind, I also believe that your user-friendly cobots (collaborative robots) of today, which only move slowly, aren’t likely to benefit from this trend. To fully support the automation needed in ecommerce logistics, industrial robot speed will be necessary.
One needs to look no further than the evening news to see other examples of why automation will grow in the manufacturing, logistics and supply chain industries in the coming years. Take our current supply chain problems and how they’ve shone a spotlight on the combination of outdated processes, labor issues, and massive volumes of goods to be moved in a short time period, and the need for automation is even more acute.
Technological Advances
Recent advances in technology have made the automation process more affordable and easier to manage. This is just the beginning of a major wave that will drastically reduce the cost and effort of automating existing processes. It will open up new opportunities where manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and other industries will find themselves able to automate business processes that just couldn’t have been automated before, either because they were cost-ineffective or they were just plain technically infeasible. The core trend to watch is the improvements in robotic intelligence. Every incremental step away from robots that are essentially trajectory-replay devices or really only platforms moving in 2D on a factory floor unlocks immense value. Of course, each of those steps requires real progress on difficult technological questions, but I think the momentum and the will to solve these problems is building.
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What’s Next
This growth in automation is gaining steam, but it won’t happen overnight. In the short term, there will still be labor shortages and clogged supply chains to deal with. But because of these market pressures, we will see increased investment in automation technology and the robots that make it work. This will, in turn, drive new innovations in the field — innovations that will automate mundane, repeatable tasks and more, and make the logistics, manufacturing and supply chain industries look far different tomorrow than they do today.
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