Threefold concentrated knowledge about e-commerce and supply chains (from left to right): Markus Schmermund, Vice President Wamas Enterprise Solution at SSI Schaefer, Dipl.-Ing. Markus Spindler, research assistant at the Chair of Materials Handling, Material Flow, Logistics at the Technical University of Munich and Dr. Jakob Beer, Director Business Development Food Retail at SSI Schaefer. © Thilo Härdtlein

The challenge for intralogistics is that the solution offered grows with the customer's business model, i.e. the sustainable intralogistics solution offers interchangeable components for different levels of automation and warehouse complexity. According to Schmermund, SSI Schaefer has a broad portfolio of different technology modules, which can be put together in a modular way and then separated again, depending on the customer's business development. The solutions offered must focus on the key drivers of unit costs, throughput times and stock levels.

"To survive as a company, you need efficient intralogistics processes." Dr. Jakob Beer, SSI Schaefer

"Amazon is a typical example of how the interface between manual work and automation works," notes Beer. "Many processes are manual, but there is an efficient interface to full automation in the direction of outgoing goods, and that's exactly where you have to start for fast-growing companies." Markus Spindler agrees. "There are many approaches for more automation. A lot is technically possible today, for example in picking. However, cost-effectiveness is still a long way off, so people are still taking on tasks, especially picking individual parts."

Markus Schmermund is convinced that the use of robots in intralogistics with the need to increase productivity makes sense when human labor costs become unattractive or the dependency becomes too great.

Beer sees a fundamental problem with automatic handling in packaging design. "We need to make packaging automatically manageable," the food retail expert demands. If you had reasonably uniform packaging, you could already pick quickly and highly efficiently today. Sensor technology, image recognition and mechanics are continuing to develop, but this is often not yet fast enough. And even if it were fast enough, there wouldn't be a business case for it because the technology is simply still too expensive. You have to approach things from both sides.

Markus Spindler does not believe that anything will change in the packaging sector in the short term. We shouldn't expect too much, warns the graduate engineer.

What does process knowledge actually mean?

The editorial team steers the conversation towards best practices and questions the term process knowledge. Schmermund says: "As a globally active company, SSI Schaefer offers the opportunity to observe and analyze different markets and characteristics of company developments and to implement the requirements in solutions. In doing so, it is crucial to implement added value even closer to the customer. To do this, I need to know and understand the customer's business model, break it down to the logistics process and map the IT processes in direct connection. Process expertise, which we are continuously expanding with our industry-specific focus, is the lever for value creation. In the fashion sector, the focus is particularly on returns processing, as the high returns rate in this industry is painful for the customer. The success of an advanced intralogistics solution is determined by the quality and variability of our systems in terms of the degree of automation - the keyword here is custom automation - and the intelligent linking with our software solutions."

For Beer, it is important to understand how to link the various components and to design the processes in such a way that maximum throughput is achieved. When it comes to things like same day or same hour, the wheat is separated from the chaff.

"There are many approaches for more automation, a lot is technically possible today, for example in picking." Markus Spindler, TU Munich

Same Day / Same Hour - a challenge for logistics specialists or the limit of what is feasible? "Same Day / Same Hour is certainly a challenge that we as intralogistics providers are prepared to solve, but it is not the limit of what is feasible. This is just one of many customer expectations that e-commerce brings with it. E-commerce in all its forms, including omni-channel, is changing the conditions for our customers. 'Customer centricity' means small order quantities and higher order frequencies in order to satisfy the individual requirements of consumers. Due to the digital networking of the entire value chain, intralogistics IT must go far beyond the warehouse and integrate the procurement and distribution side right through to the consumer. Companies with an end-to-end supply chain react more quickly to consumer needs. Intralogistics' answer to the shift from established to customer- and technology-driven business models is a higher-level control instance for optimizing, controlling and monitoring all data and goods flows within the supply chain. This guarantees the customer process leadership."

... and the pace of delivery is getting faster and faster

Spindler is impressed by the pace of development. "Supermarkets have been around since the early 1900s. The internet and e-commerce have been around since 1990. That has developed slowly. The leap to same-day was relatively quick. Amazon promotes 2-hour delivery, free of charge. The question is, do customers use this in everyday life? In my experience, it is still very little used. It's usually not necessarily due to the cost." Spindler does not want to venture a prediction as to whether it will be widely used at some point.

"When we talk about same day and same hour, it requires an omni-channel concept," Jakob Beer points out. "You have to think across locations, because it's impossible to serve the customer within two hours from a warehouse 500 km away. After this step, it is no longer an intralogistics problem. It is then an interlogistics or supply chain problem, which we also have to think through in our planning," concludes Beer.