How the metrics we inherited from manual warehouses became the metrics we least trust, and why the new ones can be just as misleading. The quarterly review opened the way it always did. The automation dashboard was green across the board. System uptime for the quarter: 98.7 percent, comfortably above target. Mean time between failures […]
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When a warehouse invests in automation, shuttles, cranes, conveyors, sortation systems, it’s almost always the purchase price and the projected efficiency gains that dominate the business case. Maintenance of the hardware itself tends to end up as a single line near the bottom of the calculation, a percentage assumed rather than calculated. That’s a mistake […]
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For a decade, piece picking has been the automation industry’s honest admission of failure. Pallets, cases, totes: all of that got automated years ago. But the single item pulled from a jumbled bin, in whatever shape, material, or orientation it happens to land in, remained the job robots couldn’t reliably do. Vendors kept promising the […]
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Most WMS implementations don’t underperform because the software is weak. They underperform because the wrong features get configured for the wrong operation. Here’s how to choose functionality that actually fits your order profile, not just what the vendor offers.
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For years, warehouse automation was sold on a simple promise: install the robots, cut the errors, lower the cost. That promise held up right until the world stopped behaving predictably. Here’s what’s changed by 2026, and why flexibility has become a metric in its own right.
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Most organizations think they have a collaboration problem when what they actually have is a defensiveness problem. People show up to meetings, share updates, hit their deadlines, and call it teamwork. But underneath that surface-level cooperation, something else is often happening: information gets filtered before it’s shared, credit gets quietly hoarded, and problems get hidden […]
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Most logistics development projects do not fail because of bad technology choices. They fail because the team assembled to design and run the project was built for a different problem than the one they actually faced. This happens more often than it should. A warehouse expansion gets staffed with people who know warehousing but not […]
Continue ReadingWalk into a distribution center running at 95 percent automation and you will struggle to find anyone doing what we used to call warehouse work. No one is picking cases by hand. No one is walking a route with a scanner. What you find instead are a handful of people standing at screens, watching a […]
Continue ReadingGo-live day gets the champagne and the case study. The research shows the real test, and the real risk to people and performance, starts the day after.
Continue ReadingThe question is no longer how to move people efficiently through a warehouse. It is how to design a space where the automation you need in five years can actually work.
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