U.S. Roadmap Looks to the Future of Material Handling and Logistics
The first draft of the U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling & Logistics was released last week and is available for review. The content of this initial draft is based on input from more than 100 thought leaders, including material handling and logistics practitioners, suppliers, academia, associations and government.
The purpose of the Roadmap is to help the industry determine how material handling and logistics challenges can be turned into action plans to develop needed capabilities in the U.S. between now and 2025.
The Roadmap identifies ten major trends in the economy, technology, and society that will shape the future of the industry:
1) The Growth of Ecommerce
2) Relentless Competition
3) Mass Personalization
4) Urbanization
5) Mobile and Wearable Computing
6) Advances in Technology
7) Sensors & The Internet of Things
8) Big Data & Predictive Analytics
9) The Changing Workforce, and
10) Sustainability.
Some of these trends, such as Ecommerce and Relentless Competition, are well underway and moving toward maturity. Others, such as Big Data and The Internet of Things, are in the early stages of development and probably won’t be mature even in
2025. Each trend, however, has the potential to have a tremendous influence on the material handling and logistics industry in the future.
From these trends, a number of important themes emerged:
People, People, People. The industry is already facing a workforce challenge, both with respect to finding good workers and training them. Absent a purposeful, coordinated effort in the future, these problems will only get worse. The industry cannot continue to grow without engineers to engineer, managers to manage, and workers to work.
The Roadmap identifies a number of important capabilities to address this challenge, including coordinated efforts to promote the field, to reach out to new demographic groups, and to improve skills training and certification.
Collaboration. Statistics on empty truck miles and facility utilization suggest that dramatic reductions in cost are possible if high levels of collaboration and sharing could be achieved in the industry. It was widely believed that significant levels of
collaboration in the industry could lead to breakthrough reductions in the cost and environmental impact of logistics. Participants identified a number of promising areas.
Despite the significant benefits of widespread collaboration, real obstacles stand in the way. Technological obstacles related to data sharing and security are certainly not insurmountable. What might be insurmountable is the need for companies
(sometimes competing companies) to trust one another enough to achieve the needed levels of asset and information sharing. There is much to do.
Sensors, Data, and Algorithms. Imagine a world in which physical objects are able to communicate with people and information systems via low-cost sensors of every variety. Imagine a world in which nearly every fact a company would want to know is available instantaneously. Imagine a world in which sophisticated algorithms make low and mid-level decisions optimally and automatically, without human intervention, leaving humans to perform tasks that require judgment and intuition. That world could be here by the year 2025.
The challenge for the material handling and logistics industry is to harness these technological capabilities—most of which are occurring outside the industry itself—and use them to its greatest advantage. The Roadmap makes several recommendations in this regard, including real-time optimization of distribution systems, cloud-based data from ubiquitous sensors, and sharing protocols to protect sensitive data.
New Methods of Distribution. The retail industry in particular is in the midst of a sea-change in distribution models. Amazon started the transformation with Amazon Prime as a guaranteed “free” and fast delivery. Other retailers have followed suit out of competitive necessity. Now Amazon and others are pursuing same-day and same-our delivery, which will put even more pressure on material handling and logistics systems for high throughput, high speed operations.
The Roadmap describes these initiatives and their implications for the industry, including emerging distribution models based on crowd-sourcing and delivery to mobile customers. Whether these models will become important parts of the distribution marketplace is a matter of speculation, but the material handling and logistics industry will play a vital role in determining their viability.
MHI is providing administrative and financial support for the development of the Roadmap. For more information and to participate, visit www.MHLroadmap.org.
