Discussion 12 822
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Feb 20, 2024
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Discuss the reasons for growing capital investment in automated supply chains during the pandemic era.
As we know with the pandemic, there were many mandates that either completely stopped or significantly slowed the supply chain of products. Given the mandates for us to only allow essential jobs to happen along with essential people to work, we can notice that business shift to a more automated approach because we know that the demand does not change that much just because we are in a pandemic. The reasons behind the move to automation was because of “
lack of workforce creating bottlenecks, increased wait time of shipping containers leading to shortages to them impacting the final price of the products” (Uttamchandani, 2023). Perfect examples of this are port processes where “companies can use intelligent digital solutions to maximize resource efficiency” (Uttamchandani, 2023). Given that a company can properly utilize data for how their supply chain needs to work as well as being able to select the correct technology to assist in their supply chain, the company will be able to “improve
their supply chain processes and efficiency” (Venkataraman, 2022).
How can robotics and automation support eCommerce in the retail industry?
Now that we understand the reasoning behind why companies investigate automation, let’s understand automation technology. “Automation technology involves the use of automatic machines, computers, or robots to perform work in manufacturing and supply chain processes more quickly and accurately than humans”
(Venkataraman, 2022). When we look to see how this would integrate in the retail industry, we would see this happen with “
using one of the most highly automated robotic fulfillment systems in the world” (Mims, 2023) that was used by Accelerate360. This is important because automation can process faster than humans. We see that Accelerate360 was able “
to accomplish in this one facility what would have required four or five times as many humans if it were a totally manual process” which is very similar to what we see with the retail industry. One of the things that makes eCommerce very successful is that “
small warehouses closer to consumers is exactly what companies need to do in order to compete with Amazon” (Mims, 2023). Other things that we can see that with automation, we can see that the system “could start to displace workers and allow companies to run their warehouses 24/7 with more efficiency” (Mims, 2023) and to also “eliminate waste and enhance efficiency in a supermarket supply chain that has struggled to cope with the disruptions” (Mims, 2023) given that they are able to properly using the systems and data to assist in automating such a process.
References:
Mims, Christopher. “The Technology That’s Helping Companies Thrive amid the Supply-Chain Chaos.” The Wall Street Journal
, Dow Jones & Company, 14 Feb. 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/supply-chain-technology-attabotics-misfits-11644612773?
mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=1. Uttamchandani, Bhavna. “Role of Automation in Post-Pandemic Supply Chain.” The Edge Quarterly
, 10 Mar. 2023, www.edgeverve.com/the-edge-quarterly/post-pandemic-supply-chains/
. Venkataraman, R. R., & Demirag, O. C. (2022). Supply Chain Management: Securing a superior global edge
. SAGE.
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