Editor’s note: This is the second of two columns on the reinvention of Macy Inc.’s retail supply chain. The first part was about inventory productivity. In this one, we look at how the New York-based retailer is incorporating sustainability into its practices and goals. Back in May, I sat in on a roundtable discussion on sustainability at the American Supply Chain Summit. Keelin Evans, Macy’s vice president of sustainability, led a lively conversation among the executives. The speakers made it clear that workforce and environmental sustainability has become integral to supply chain management. For her part, Evans’ message was that…
Editor’s note: This is the first of two columns on the reinvention of Macy’s retail supply chain. In this one, we look at the department store leader’s focus on inventory productivity. Can a 165-year-old department store chain evolve to meet today’s retail shopper and compete with fast fashion, off-price, and pure e-tailers? And, if so, what is the role of supply chain in that transformation? Those are questions that Macy’s Inc., which had annual net sales of more than $24 billion in fiscal year 2022, began to answer before COVID-19. That’s when it launched the reinvention of the supply chain…
At ProMat 2023, I had a fascinating conversation with Brett Wood, the president and CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America. He noted that if you based your view of the economy on television news, you’d think we’re in the doldrums. Now, the long-predicted recession may be coming – we’ve never had this many consecutive years of growth without a downturn in the past – but the numbers that relate to industry are pretty darn good. In Toyota Material Handling's corner of the industry, these are the best of times. Wood said the materials handling industry sold a combined total…
Bowery Farming, a vertical farming company based in New York City, is using automated storage and retrieval system, or ASRS, technology to meet changing consumer food preferences driven by freshness and sustainability. “We’re building the future of food through smart farms and proprietary technology that is simpler, safer and vastly more sustainable than traditional agriculture,” said Justin Frankert, vice president of robotics, hardware and automation. “We’re designing and building smart, controlled-environment farms that use a combination of our proprietary operating system and technology. We’re 100 times more productive while using a fraction of the resources.” In Bowery Farming’s vertical farms,…
Back in 2013, Medline Industries LP worked with Swisslog to become the first company in the U.S. to implement a robotic goods-to-person system from AutoStore. The original site was a 600,000-square-foot distribution center north of Chicago in Libertyville, Ill. That first deployment, featured in the June 2015 issue of Modern Materials Handling (a sibling publication to Robotics 24/7), sported 43 bots in a relatively small area plus four goods-to-person workstations. The robots managed 27,570 totes across 37,750 storage locations with throughput of up to 12,500 lines per day. It was a bold move but even then, Medline was embracing high…
In late August, Gap Inc. opened its newest Customer Experience Center in Longview, Texas. The 850,000-sq.-ft. distribution center is dedicated to e-fulfillment for Old Navy in the Southwest and is part of Gap’s continued focus on enhancing the quality of its customer service. Earlier this summer, the San Francisco-based retailer expanded operations at its facility in Fishkill, N.Y. It added automated receiving, multi-level pick modules, enhanced returns-processing capabilities, and more. The Texas facility brings the number of U.S. e-commerce fulfillment centers to seven, plus an additional distribution center in Canada. They include facilities in Fresno, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and two…
I will never forget ProMat 2007. That’s the first industry event where I saw what we now call autonomous mobile robots or AMRs. More importantly, these robots were targeting warehousing and distribution. The exhibitors were Kiva Systems, now part of Amazon; RMT Robotics, now part of Cimcorp; and Seegrid. Each had a relatively small booth in which its vehicles moved on their own like oversized toys. While ProMat 2005 was all about RFID, AMRs were the hit of the 2007 show. Here’s what I wrote at the time: In 2007, RMT Robotics, Kiva Systems, and Seegrid introduced mobile robots to…
Businesses have never been under more pressure to keep their customers satisfied. They’re still contending with the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing labor and supply shortages, and a never-ending string of disruptions. These challenges will pass. Other changes, like the exponential increase in e-commerce sales and direct-to-consumer deliveries, are permanent, and automation can play a role. Distribution centers (DCs) are handling more items than ever, while having to do it accurately and with greater speed to meet increasingly high customer expectations. Once taken for granted, the DC is now a vital component of a company’s go-to-market strategy. “The last…
The headline in the weekend Wall Street Journal caught my eye. “More Online Shoppers Are Taking It Offline.” The gist of the article was that pretty much everyone, including the materials handling industry, assumed that in-person shopping was dead in the water. Instead, the Journal reported, “stores are mounting a comeback. … By the fourth quarter of 2021….consumer buying habits [were] roughly back to their prepandemic trend.” Now, the prepandemic trend was a steady march towards more and more e-fulfillment, but the statement we heard over and over – that in five months, the pandemic accelerated that pace by fiver…
OK, I was a skeptic. Boy, was I wrong! I arrived in Atlanta last week with memories of MODEX 2020 dancing in my head. As anyone who was there remembers, attendance was sparse on the busiest of days. Having attended one event this past January with light traffic, and reading accounts of other events that have struggled to get people in the door, I didn’t know what to expect. Well, MODEX 2022 was perhaps the best trade event I’ve attended in many years. The mood was exuberant, the crowds were there from Monday afternoon through the end of the day…
“Integration” is considered a dirty word by many in industry. Sure, there are more software and automation tools than ever, but getting them to play nicely with one another can still be a major challenge. CJ Logistics wanted to add robots and other technologies to a 1.1 million-sq.-ft. facility in Dallas, but it needed to address integration with the help of SVT Robotics. “This was a strategic initiative for our company,” said Laura Adams, vice president of technology, engineering systems, and solutions (TES) at CJ Logistics. “In this particular building, we wanted to deploy several technologies that CJ Logistics is…
Small to midsize distributors have begun to adopt automation. For instance, we featured NorthShore Care Supply's use of autonomous mobile robots last year. Now, robotic palletizing has sped up receiving operations, taken labor out of the process, and created a safer work environment. In July of 2020, I toured NorthShore Care Supply's recently opened 173,000-square-foot distribution center (DC) north of Chicago. Adam Greenberg, a University of Chicago MBA grad, founded the company in 2002. He got the idea for incontinence supplies after some family members who were going through illnesses expressed their reluctance to purchase products like Depends at the…