Industry Trends

By Nick Fortuna Modern supply chains are too complicated for any one company to do everything well, so strategic partnerships are key to solving the big problems facing the material handling industry and its customers. The right partnerships make business relationships more transparent, resilient and sustainable because customers get to work with best-of-breed providers working in their individual areas of ...

In these unprecedented times, supply chain solutions are more critical to business success than they have ever been. To answer this call, MHI created the ProMat Digital Experience (ProMatDX), a new digital event experience designed to power up manufacturing and supply chain professionals with critical access to the latest solutions they need now to improve the resiliency and agility of ...

By Jennifer Pazour, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Agility, the ability to move quickly and easily, is a powerful, and some may say necessary, skill for success in today’s supply chains. This need for agile decision-making is changing how organizations acquire warehousing and distribution capabilities. An emerging, more flexible option is on-demand warehousing, which enables ...

By Sandy Smith One of the first casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic was in-person shopping. With mandatory shutdowns of non-essential retail and customers fearful about being in public, necessities moved to e-commerce. As the pandemic lingered, it shifted habits in ways that aren’t necessarily changing back. “People are saying, ‘When are we going to get back to normal?’ That’s like ...

By Christian Dow For high-end grocery chains seeking to provide a premium customer experience, it’s always a bad thing when customers are outnumbered in the aisles by fast-moving order pickers who often outcompete them for the same product inventory. Whether those order pickers are representing third parties such as Instacart or Shipt or are store employees hired during the pandemic ...

Merging these robotics and automated solutions with other digital technologies like IoT, AI, advanced analytics, AR/VR and cloud computing grows the resiliency firms need and builds in the visibility necessary to deliver on ever-changing consumer demands as well as mitigating future shocks. This issue of MHI Solutions tackles this important topic to help you answer these questions with best practices, ...

By John Paxton, CEO, MHI The pandemic has thrown many challenges into supply chains, and rarely have leaders faced such complex and changing conditions. What COVID-19 revealed is that many supply chains grew brittle in their decades-long quest for cost-savings while others that invested in emerging technologies and risk-planning proved to be agile and resilient enough to survive, and even ...

The organizations whose supply chains were aggressive about pre-pandemic investments in the digital technologies that enable them to serve e-commerce customers prove to be the most successful at weathering the coronavirus storm. By Carol Miller Expectations were low among financial analysts in the summer of 2020. Just prior to the release of second quarter results from multiple companies, predictions were ...

Proactive adoption strategies for robotics, automation and intelligent transportation management solutions for the supply chain providing greater operational resilience. By Mary Lou Jay There’s little downtime these days at companies that provide robotics, automation and intelligent transportation management solutions for the supply chain. Since the pandemic hit, they’ve been flooded with requests for their products. David Clear, chief revenue officer ...

Key figures from the International Federation of Robotics’ World Robotics Report 2020 and the 2020 MHI Annual Industry Report highlight robotics from a regional and global perspective and from a supply chain standpoint. Read More…