Is Automation the Future of Supply Chain ?

            

  

    Hello Readers, This is Muhammad Jassim from Amrita School of Business Coimbaotore. Welcome to my Fourth blog on Supply Chain , Hope you find it interesting and insightful. This week blog is all about Is Automation future of Supply Chain.

    There comes a frequent question, what role does Automation plays in the Supply Chain in coming near future. I am fascinated to write on this topic about the growing trends in supply chain with respect to automation. It is believed that emerging technologies are the forefront of Supply chains future.

Automation in Supply Chain

   The recent intervention of COVID-19 proved that the retail economy is becoming more e-commerce based, meaning orders shipped directly to consumers from large distributors have increased. This as a result made ecommerce sectors to spend more implementing automation technologies. Supply chain technologies are becoming more prominent in business processes and it seems that automation alongside machine learning and artificial intelligence are the future of Industry 4.0. 

    From the data from various sources it is found that 55% of retail, management and logistics professionals are investing in warehouse automation and 47% in predictive analytics. In the recent report from Gartner it is showed that 30% of operational warehouse workers will be supplemented, not replaced, by collaborative robots in 2023. This shows how essential the implementation of technology is and will be in the future, especially now COVID-19 has proven to be a catalyst in technology adoption. The recent pandemic has thrown many challenges into the procurement and supply chain sector and proved that technology would be essential for successfully implementing social distance and risk mitigation in warehousing and distribution. AI-based automation within warehouses is extensive. The opportunities for implementing such technologies is becoming readily available, from mechanical arms that can sort and handle cargo to intelligent software capable of calculating daily stock rotations. 

    So this pandemic paved a clear way to implement automation in various process of supply chain as it is the need of an hour so the technology that the firm should adopt is purely based on their decision on which part of their process requires to be automated from the level of must required to adopt to least bothered. Lets see how all the traditional firms react upon this.