We can now damage-control economical disasters thanks to corporate automation and other factors that allow a company to function learning. It might be a scary advancement for some people. However, it opens doors for IT professionals gifted in analytics, workflow redesigning, managing vendors and integration. One case to look at is the warehouse and how it made companies maintain IT costs while responding to it. Let’s see how it began.

In the 20th century, warehouses had become a necessity, having extensive manual and inventory operations being performed. These operations were frequently required to be expedited because the warehouse wasn’t aware of the marketing plans. Since then, ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) emerged to surface to address this issue. However, the warehouses still lagged.

As time went one, warehouses were in the enterprise’s goal plans. People have started to realize the potential it holds and its competitive advantage. Some reasons behind change include rising global competition for customer wallet share, but also the growth of e-commerce platforms has increased. In the 21st century, at least 12% to 14% of growth has been seen in e-commerce platforms. From an IT person’s perspective, integration of multiple shipping channels with the warehouses is required.

The philosophical change impacted the warehouses the most. Companies now strategize to have their warehouses at the “front lines” of customer experience. They recognize the need for instant order fulfilment, and customer satisfaction is the key to a successful e-commerce business. Such goals are only attainable with the help of 21st-century warehouse tools and tech. According to Mitch Rosenberg, Marketing VP at Kiva Systems, the consumers of the 21st-century customers are different from the ones before them, so warehouses should also be focusing on delivering beneficial customer experience.

Delivering the goods to a customer makes the warehouse distribution center almost a “store.” The customer experience includes everything that happens in the warehouse as well. This kind of transformation requires time. The industry experts estimated that even in the 21st century, 70% of the retail sales would be from the brick-and-mortar businesses.

Companies are still moving towards business automation and funding warehouse technologies to improve their efficiency and responsiveness. “In the 20th century, companies worked on this by optimizing their stores so that customers could walk out of these stores with the items they had purchased. Now, people want this same kind of instant gratification by immediately obtaining their goods through e-commerce, but this is hard to get online. For e-commerce to compete with traditional brick and mortar retail in an area like instant customer order fulfilment, warehouse distribution centers must be optimized to deliver on that promise,” Rosenberg added.

What are your thoughts regarding technology and business automation

? How can we pass all of the issues with the help of technology?

With Batch-and-wait operations, orders are batched up when it’s time to pick them up, and then they go their separate ways automatically into customer orders. This business automation increases the processing speed and reduces the latency when they picked orders individually. It resulted in improved performance of the distribution centers.