Industry 4.0 has a lot of promise — automation, efficiency upgrades, and technological awareness through digital transformation. After e-commerce hit its arguable peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has to find ways to ride that towering wave with continued improvements to operations.
Ultimately, this comes down to faster packaging and delivery. The magic key behind meeting these goals is optimizing fulfillment and leveraging automation to enter the e-commerce industry of the future and bring the most smiles to customers.
Why E-commerce Must Employ Automated Packaging
Global revenue for e-commerce sites will exceed $4 trillion by 2024, signifying online orders will not slow down — especially in Asia and the Americas. Incoming orders will rise every year from now on at exponential rates. It’s too much for humans to self-package, so companies must employ automation tactics to fulfill hungry buyers.
Businesses may use multiple automation strategies in tandem, attempting to find the best symbiotic combinations. Others may rely solely on a single mechanism or technique. Regardless, it will require patience and experimentation with automation tools until a sweet spot arrives. Here are some considerations companies can ponder when supplementing manual packing practices:
- New machinery
- Inventory or order management software informed by sensors
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms
- Requesting aid from third parties in logistics
One of the key ways that businesses are using automation to optimize fulfillment is through automated packaging systems. Particularly during demand peaks or warehousing employee shortages, systems that can automatically create a right-sized box, a label, and an accurate shipping price all in one process can optimize fulfillment and save shippers money.
Organizational buy-in for tools accelerating automation is crucial for successful implementation and reaping the most out of the financial and mental effort. Customers require this because their expectations are higher. They anticipate dependable, forward-thinking brands embracing digital transformation and tech that craft customer-centric experiences.
Enterprises must consider everything surrounding packaging and delivery, such as content creation and marketing, and how to automate and streamline these processes because they directly impact customer loyalty and assumptions about the quality and speed of deliverables. The more cohesive and powerful the overall brand image appears, the more they equate this to a modern, reliable e-commerce platform.
Why Automation Leads to Faster Fulfillment
Businesses must look at their supply chain and execute process discovery to unravel where automation could speed up packing and delivery procedures while meeting quality concerns and compliance guidelines.
Many organizations need accurate performance data. Does every company know how much their hiring has correlated with increased demand? Do they know the times of the year their operations spike or fall behind expectations? Every question and corner is a variable that impacts efficiency, including:
- Driver schedules and routes
- How in-house machines handle third-party packing materials
- Ratio of box size versus contents and protective material
- Quality of training for technicians to use packing software
- Instituting unrealistic metrics that skew reality of efficiency
It all starts with knowing how well the business performs and comparing that to market research and surveyed customer expectations. Over 50% of customers prefer branded packaging and discuss it or recommend it with friends and family, so how is a company discovering these research points to incite packaging changes in a way that focuses on speed and personalization? How can automation bridge these worlds to solidify more content customer relationships by delivering their packages efficiently?
Every improvement to these areas, among others, yields gradual upticks in faster packaging and fulfillment. Automated data collection provides tangible evidence for packaging expectations, regardless of the forecasting method. Machines can make determinations based on data for short-term events like holidays or use passive demand information to adjust to everyday operations.
Automation tools inform machinery, software and people to adjust techniques, speed and workflow based on immediate, real-time analytics to produce output consistency. For example, an AI could have enough operational data to create a digital twin, drawing out simulations of procedural changes that lead to genuine implementation. It saves companies time from fruitless experiments, expanding the time workforces can devote to competitive shipping deliverables.
How Automation Benefits an Organization’s Fulfillment
Successful automation relies on communication inside and outside the organization. If everyone works together to deliver faster fulfillment, it forges stronger, more agile B2B relationships by proxy. Collaboration between current suppliers and new, diverse suppliers that explore automation with the company will increase business resilience — all because an organization provides clarity of their forecasting, expectations and goals.
Stronger industrial relationships are necessary in a world laden with material shortages and burdening delays. Focusing on automation for delivering products faster requires analyzing operational trends and habits. The laser focus will inevitably optimize packing and reduce waste because automation leaves less room for human error than manual strategies.
An example of these realizations manifesting is with trends like automated warehouse picking — when companies have too much backlogged stock, they scramble to build new warehouses to keep their precious inventory safe. Meanwhile, it’s poorly cataloged and collecting dust when it deserves a home. Automation keeps accurate tabs on what is on shelves and how well the products perform to determine the next action for repurposing inventory.
If robots and workers have to sift through fewer unnecessary stores, they can get products to the packing line faster — and, therefore, to front porches in a timely fashion.
Every pallet of damaged corrugated sheets or ruined stretch wrap pile associated with unpleasant additional labor dissolves. What was previously destined for landfill can have robots automate categorizing and transporting based on:
- Waste types
- Ability to be recycled
- Quantity and weight
- Adverse environmental impact on greenhouse gas emissions
- Carbon footprint
- Amount of waste caused by preventable factors
- Amount of recycled content in the materials
The constant data collection helps companies perform further optimization via automated, data-driven suggestions. Using automation to decarbonize and reduce waste delights customers, too, because they want to invest in companies and their products when they dedicate themselves to the planet’s well-being. Additionally, human and robotic efforts can shift to more meaningful deliverables instead of worrying about waste management, which is a massive time sink for productivity metrics.
Why Customers Want Companies to Automate Packing
Automation provides priceless information for companies wanting to meet strict fulfillment standards. It reveals improvement areas. It encourages workers to devote their hours to more meaningful endeavors that produce results, which leads to happier customers. Products get out faster, and companies save money and time, increasing the likelihood that customers remain loyal to a brand’s mission to optimize and provide industry-leading fulfillment.
Emily Newton is the Editor-in-Chief of Revolutionized Magazine, an online publication that explores innovations in science and technology.
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