Statement
In demand: Logistics for food X.0
The current discussion about the transformation and further development of logistics in the food sector, or more precisely in the fresh food sector, is certainly not new, but it is gaining new momentum, not least with Amazon's market entry. It stands to reason that the e-commerce success story will not stop at this sector either. And yet, a few special conditions apply here.
First of all, there is the traditional supermarket customer, who - apart from individual service areas - kindly provides the retail company with their picking services along the shelves free of charge when they store in the store. And this circumstance also made it possible to align the entire replenishment processes in terms of material flow at the level of the "Kollo" collective packaging. This replenishment logistics has been consistently refined and optimized over decades, both in the area of manual solutions and the now successfully established automatic colli picking systems from system integrators such as Witron, SSI Schaefer and Vanderlande. And Walmart's failed attempt to gain a foothold in the German market is impressive proof of how successfully this logistics world has been mastered in practice.
On the other hand, there is also no reason to continue to focus on maintaining the status quo, as customer expectations are changing and a good 15 years of online shopping have undoubtedly left their mark. And even if it is pointless to philosophize about what proportion of customers are actually prepared to buy groceries online (and potentially incur additional costs), the very concrete efforts of CEP service providers such as guaranteeing delivery windows ("ETA capability") or current Amazon concepts such as "Amazon Key" and "Amazon Flex" provide sufficient reason to take a close look at the effects of this change on intralogistics.
One thing is obvious: "package logistics", which is perfectly geared towards today's store deliveries, will not be the answer. To put it bluntly: the "removal from the package" stage, i.e. the separation from the container, is simply missing here. The customer order compilation in the supermarket, which has already been tested in isolated cases, i.e. the parallel execution of order picking alongside the classic customers in the store, is probably also out of the question, if only because of the additional transport between the distribution center and the store.
This raises the central question of how the ideal design of these distribution logistics should be achieved. In the area of order picking, the entire portfolio of established and probable future (picking robots?) solutions will have to be scrutinized. However, pure new planning based on familiar solutions from shipping logistics, pharmaceutical wholesaling or similar will probably not be the only way to achieve this, as the burgeoning alternatives for delivery (as already mentioned above, see Amazon Flex, for example) and a potential revival of pick-up stations define other boundary conditions in terms of order throughput time, order size and variance, and so on. Completely new solutions will emerge that integrate delivery and goods handover into an overall concept. One thing is guaranteed: Intralogistics will remain exciting!
Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Thorsten Schmidt
Head of the Institute for Technical Logistics and Work Systems at TU Dresden
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