Vaccinate warehouse operations with a new, post-covid beginning

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2021

This morning, I turned on the television and watched the first stretch-wrapped pallets of the just-authorized vaccine being loaded onto a truck at a Pfizer plant in Michigan. From there, the pallets were headed to FedEx’s logistics hub in Memphis where they would be delivered to 153 locations across the 50 states. The event was both historic and mundane: Historic in that the shipments represent the hope of a nation that in the coming months, we’ll begin to put 2020—and COVID—in the rearview mirror; mundane in that this is a scene repeated millions of times a day, without fanfare, in plants and distribution centers across the country. Two of…

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The COVID-19 pandemic is arguably the most prolonged and harshest disruption the supply chain industry has seen in the last few decades.

It has been quite a journey for businesses and warehouses from reacting to the situation, navigating operational changes through the lockdown, such as social distancing, and preparing along the way for the eventual re-opening as vaccine trials raise the hope of the end to the pandemic.

As we begin to turn a corner, it is paramount for business executives and supply chain leaders to envision with sufficient clarity what the next normal will look like. They must plan on how best to position a new beginning in order to emerge victorious in the competitive market where survival often is the first hurdle to cross.

In this article, we’ll build the case for a digital warehouse of the future.

As we take stock of the impacts and trends created by the pandemic on the warehouse function to envision the next reality, in many ways the trends are the same as they were pre-COVID, but represent a more accelerated, amplified and acute version of those trends.

Warehouse operations feel the pressure

Warehouses were under pressure from a variety of factors before the pandemic. COVID has accelerated them (see Figure 1). They are as follows.

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