Welcome to the December 15th Warehouse & Logistics News. So, UK retailing has survived another Black Friday. Dare we say it – perhaps our retailers and their suppliers and logistics partners should take a lesson from the consumers. After several Black Fridays they have learnt to be relaxed about how long it can take to get on popular retail sites, and stay patient about delivery times and the amount of delivery vehicles on the roads. Omnichannel retailing is here to stay: now we have to manage expectations.
Meanwhile as we finish a busy year of bringing you stories and features from around the industry, we hope you’ve found it useful. We’re back again in January with our first issue of 2016.
We’re enclosing with this issue our 2015-16 Annual, highlighting major suppliers and innovators in the different categories of equipment and solutions, together with comments from the leading trade associations. We hope you enjoy it.
As Britain winds down for Christmas, the supply chains are working up to the break and all through it. So it’s business as usual in our scheduled features in the main magazine. ‘Fork Trucks’ takes a look at the industry’s wheeled workhorses, ‘Storage Solutions’ helps you maximise space efficiency in the warehouse with the latest ideas and solutions, and ‘Pallet Focus’ shows that there’s much more to pallets than wooden ones.
There may or may not be a Santa Claus, but for parents with young children at home, toy retailers can be relied on as the next best thing. On our front cover, we have a suitably seasonal story from Swisslog. DB Schenker, the global logistics provider, is the first to implement the pioneering CarryPick solution, part of the Swisslog Click&Pick e-commerce portfolio, for its customer Lekmer.com, Scandinavia’s largest online toy retailer. Instead of Santa’s elves, the system features robots, along with transportable racks, and WMS. The automated storage and goods-to-person order fulfilment system in Swisslog’s solution is specifically designed for the intralogistics requirements of ecommerce businesses, where product variability, delivery times and cost efficiency are daily challenges.
A Merry Christmas to everyone reading this, men, women and robots in warehouses with optical character recognition capability! If you are working through Christmas and New Year to keep the supply chains moving, we hope you get a break at some point to rest and recharge. Have a good one, and see you all in January.
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