Recently, Maersk offered its insights into what the warehousing sector will look like this year.
Here are a few conclusions: (Excerpted )
Space availability: The warehousing and distribution market next year will be displaying similar trends continuing from 2024 among these is the duality of space availability, tight in certain individual markets, and plenty available in many other areas, where brands and retailers display a wary behaviour on what they are willing to commit to and are perhaps therefore holding less stock (particularly in Asia). This trend, in particular the large-scale availability of space, will most likely extend well into 2025.
Automation: Just as predicted for this closing year, automation remains a crucial trend for warehousing. A long-term movement that will expand for several years. Considered “a long play” when designing a facility and gradually implementing this technology, its installation and development can be at minimum a 2–3-year project.
Regardless, 2025 will see this trend accelerating and increasing particularly when designing new operations or warehouse solutions for companies. Multiple options will be explored, comparing automation to what is considered a “traditional style facility”, considering benefits and possible challenges.
Automation will be often chosen for new warehousing and distribution projects, increasing even further the discussion around this in the logistics industry’s “hot topic”. The challenge when implementing automation will remain as cost. The return on investment (ROI) of its implementation requires a payback over a long period (unless it is a very small automation project, such as automating only a selected part of the operation or of the facility).
In summary, for standard and bigger projects, the payback will be more than 5 years before being available. Despite this, a move towards automation will still be ongoing in the next year, as a long-term investment, and will be quite transformative through the whole supply chain.
Towards bigger and better: the size of warehouses will continue to grow. In the last 30 years, the warehousing and distribution industry has been moving towards bigger and better structures, now moving towards more than 100,000 square metre buildings, using better warehouse management systems, faster computer systems, updated inventory control systems that link what is sold in retail stores and what new warehouses can supply through a modern order management systems. 2025 will see even more technological advancement that can support and manage the size of bigger warehouses, providing greater economy of scale, while lowering product’s cost per unit.
