Watch: Meeting Labor Challenges in the Warehouse

The labor challenges confronting warehouses today are about more than simply finding and paying more bodies to do the work, says Dwight Klappich, vice president and fellow with Gartner.

Labor continues to be the major motivation for warehouses to adopt robotics in their facilities, but the more specific reason is shifting, Klappich says. Just a few years ago, employers were most concerned about labor availability. Now the conversation is more around cost. That’s because warehouses initially addressed the availability problem by “trying to pay their way out of it,” through high hourly rates, incentives and bonuses. And that strategy is simply not sustainable.

Klappich sees the labor issue as more than a short-term problem today. Many of the industrialized countries of the world are experiencing shrinking populations — meaning that, not only are there fewer people available to do the work, there are fewer consumers to buy the products that flow from the warehouses. The likely long-term result is a consolidation of businesses and product choices, which will reduce the need for warehouses and the labor that staffs them.

So is the answer just more robots? Klappich stresses that automation will never completely replace humans. The jobs that are ripest for robotics are those that people don’t want anyway — heavy manual labor in uncomfortable conditions. But that doesn’t mean that the industry will be taken over by “dark” or “lights-out” warehouses, in which there are no people at all. Human staffing levels will be cut, to be sure, but there will still be a need for engineers, maintenance experts and a certain number of people working alongside the robots.

One way in which the robotics industry has changed over the years is the way it sells automation, Klappich says. Early adopters — making up perhaps 20% of the market — jumped at the first wave of systems. But most facilities today need to see a specific use case, before they’ll invest heavily in robots. They want to know that a particular model of robot can perform discrete tasks such as case picking or truck loading. “Vendors are waking up,” Klappich says. “The business [today] is by solutions.”