2015 Warehousing and Storage Industry report

The 2015 Warehousing and Storage” industry report from Statista is out and I got it from MHL site.

The report has consolidated data from reputed public and private sources - of course all from US since the report is focussed only on North America. Wonder if similar reports are published for the rest of the world - esp for Asia/ India. Though I doubt if any organized way of classifying and reliably capturing data is in place to produce reports like these. 

Some of the interesting trends I see from this report

• The overall US positive growth sentiment also resonates in this industry with about 95% respondents confirming that they believe that their business will grow or remain stable within the next two years. 

Again its a survey which captures the 'sentiment' I would actually like the intent to be captured instead by recording any planned increases in budgetary allocations)

• While WMS systems is a 1 Billion USD market there seems to be lot of scope for integrating these systems with warehouse automated systems and integration with the rest of the application landscape. 

Good news for the IT products and services though there has got to be a stooong case and ROI justifications for the same. Expensive reporting/ BI software investments will not probably replace excel / VBA generated reports just for better look and feel

• Overall demand for real time end to end SCM Visibility solutions is also expected to be high in the coming years. 

In fact it could be a compliance mandate from governmental agencies considering the security implications of goods crossing border

• Value addition by the warehouses show an improvement. 

Looks like Delayed differentiation or Postponement which is crucial in SCM to control inventory levels, is catching on

• Businesses in these sector seem to be consolidating to leverage economies of scale while at the same time new establishments being set up is increasing. 

There seems to be an enthusiasm amongst the entrepreneurs to come up with new models to cater to the new omni channel distribution requirements while the older models or owners who were not able to cope up are selling out

• Avg salaries increased a bit (as per US standards) overall employment decreased but the weekly hrs too decreased. 

Skilled labour augmenting automated systems is increasingly required in this industry - as with all others

• More patents are being filed in Support activities and Processes than in Product based services. 

Incremental improvements in process innovation seems to be more effective and thus adapted

I have not included the actual report or quoted all the figures since I am not sure the implications of doing so on my blog. Its freely available through websites - after registration - so go ahead and use that bandwidth you paid for. 

I would have liked to understand any trends in the level of automation in the warehouses. While there are lots of exciting technologies and hardware out there, and have been available now for a few years, I was astonished to find the relatively lower level of adoption in a few places where I had first hand information. Only a few major warehouses in the entire chain seem to have been automated so far. Maybe its only for a certain scale of operations it is a viable economic option.