26 August, 2025

How Warehouse Automation Boosts Efficiency & Operations

Posted on 26 August, 20251 September, 2025 by Will Priestman

As an industrial decision-maker, you probably hear about peers who have automated processes in warehouses and achieved remarkable results. If you’re considering doing the same, start by becoming familiar with the leading warehouse automation companies and the likely benefits of installing their technologies.

Learn About Vendors and Offerings

Specialty service providers optimize your investments through innovative items, services and software. Reputable options also support the chances of meaningful outcomes and successful implementations.

1. Arnold Machinery Company: This business has developed a reputation as one of the best warehouse automation companies in the Western U.S. due to its commitment to providing outstanding customer service and needs-based material handling solutions. Free, on-site consultations help you learn about potential ways forward.	2. Swisslog: As a designer, producer and improver of advanced logistics advancements, this entity pioneers purposeful and results-driven possibilities, partnering with customers at every step. Clients in industries like fashion, grocery, and food processing depend on these enhancements to optimize metrics, boost capabilities and enhance satisfaction.
3. Element Logic: This enterprise has maximized client successes since its 1985 founding. Many offerings encompass automated picking options that target productivity and accuracy. The vendor has a long history of innovation and includes tech such as robots and machine learning in its product assortment.	4. FORTNA: This organization handles the end-to-end design and production responsibilities of creating data-powered upgrades for throughout supply chains. Users rely on the products to reduce error rates, elevate profitability, and maximize output while incorporating its proprietary processes, tools and algorithms to increase visibility.

Start researching entities and browse their websites while considering which challenges you hope to solve with automated solutions. Finalizing an estimated budget before scheduling sales calls with shortlisted vendors can also create better outcomes by setting expectations about your planned uses and available resources.

Know What to Expect From Automating Warehouse Processes

Talking to other professionals who have recently automated their facilities helps you learn about the top advantages, common challenges, unexpected outcomes and workers’ responses to processes. What are some of the top automation benefits?

1. Workforce Optimization

Many warehouses face labor shortages caused by employee retirement, high turnover and the time required to train new workers. Automation solves numerous difficulties, allowing companies to accomplish more with smaller teams. Strategically chosen technologies also reduce injury and accident rates, tackling common absence reasons and minimizing the time spent on tedious tasks that reduce employee engagement and satisfaction.

2. High Accuracy

As warehouses become larger and contain more products, verifying item locations and quantities becomes difficult. Automated solutions boost visibility while minimizing manual processes.

In one example, IKEA uses over 250 drones across 73 distribution centers. These automated vehicles count inventory and record missing items or those in the wrong places. Each warehouse contains an average of 5,000 to 8,000 stock-keeping units that the drones track. They even operate in the dark, saving electricity and allowing tasks to occur outside business hours.

3. Growth Potential

Automation becomes an attractive possibility as decision-makers assess practical options to strengthen competitiveness. If your long-term goals include entering new markets or introducing additional products, those aspirations naturally cause growth, and automated solutions facilitate such expansion.

One third-party logistics business integrated an automation solution into its product-picking processes to meet rising customer demands. Executives expect the improvement will boost output rates by over 40% while equipping crews to enhance their results. Similarly, automated storage and retrieval systems feature compact designs that let users store larger quantities of products without expanding property footprints.

4. Beneficial Collaboration

Although many discussions center on robots replacing workers, most current successful solutions have humans working alongside them. These innovations feature several built-in safety features that protect people while eliminating the error-prone parts of their tasks. Robotic equipment can do single responsibilities for hours, whereas monotonous duties make employees tired or frustrated.

Specialized warehouse robots excel at repetitive tasks, letting humans use their creativity and problem-solving skills more often. Amazon uses a proprietary robotic system called Sequoia to optimize facility layouts and keep products closer to the customers who buy them. It accelerates inventory identification and storage as much as 75% with mobile robotics. Machines bring items directly to containers or employees preparing shoppers’ orders.

5. Flexibility and Responsiveness

Rapid supply changes demand quick, informed adjustments. Warehouse automation enables those improvements, helping decision-makers accommodate additional customers, expand workforces and remain relevant in a competitive industry.

You may use analytics platforms and warehouse management systems to track trends, find optimization opportunities and monitor processes. Automation addresses identified challenges so you can respond to new developments or changing requirements. They also increase awareness of bottlenecks, quality control issues or other problems, allowing you to fix them sooner.

Prioritize Automation Investments Today

Whether you focus on picking, storage or another area, specialized technologies from the best warehouse automation companies accelerate processes, tighten quality control and make tasks more rewarding. After choosing and installing your products, consider selecting several key performance indicators to track.

These show if you are on track to achieve particular goals or need additional adjustments for better results. Sharing those metrics with employees also keeps them accountable and motivates them, demonstrating that automated equipment streamlines work and brings satisfying outcomes.

Tax Teams Powering Supply Chain Resilience

Posted on 26 August, 202522 August, 2025 by David Priestman

When tax meets trade stronger supply chains can be built, writes Chris Hall (pictured below), Senior Tax Officer – Global Tax & Compliance at Vertex.

The global supply chain has long been defined by its complexity. Every time an item is purchased and delivered to a customer, there are a wide variety of processes, relationships and strategic decisions that must align to ensure it arrives on time.

However, evolving global dynamics and shifting trade policies have pushed supply chain resilience to the top of the agenda, making this already complex process even more challenging. To adapt, supply chain teams will need to explore other ways to simplify operations and collaborate with broader parts of the organisation – and one often underutilised area is the tax team.

Why Tax Teams Are Critical

With unique access to data, deep knowledge of indirect tax regulations, and familiarity with enterprise systems, tax professionals are well-positioned to support supply chain strategies, particularly in a time of rapid legal and regulatory change.

Indirect tax departments sit in the middle of regulatory compliance, enterprise technology, and global trade, so they often have access to a wealth of operational data that supply chain teams may not have. They also often have a deeper understanding of the business processes than other departments because they must defend the Company from audits, which involves deep dives on transaction data. This means they can become collaborators in building adaptive and forward-looking supply chain strategies.

For example, by analysing VAT data, an indirect tax department can identify discrepancies in supplier performance, highlight inefficiencies in cross-border logistics, or spot patterns that suggest regulatory exposure. When shared with supply chain teams, these insights can drive improvements, supporting more informed procurement decisions.

Getting Ahead of the Disruption

As changes continually disrupt supply chains, logistic professionals must ensure they have strategies in place to stay ahead. Tax teams can play a central role in building these plans by helping establish early warning systems that detect risks before they escalate.
There are three foundational elements to making that happen:

Creating an enterprise-wide data repository

An effective risk strategy built on a centralised data storage system, or “data lake”, offers key benefits to supply chain professionals by consolidating financial, operational, tax, and qualitative data in one place. This enables early detection of disruptions, facilitates anomaly identification, supports more informed cross-functional decisions, and ensures consistent supplier risk scoring. With integrated data, teams can model scenarios, streamline reporting, and improve visibility, ultimately enhancing supply chain resilience.

Using AI to enable actionable alarms

AI excels at finding patterns that humans miss, especially across seemingly disconnected systems. To make these tools truly effective, businesses must calibrate AI models to avoid false positives and focus on highly specific, business-relevant scenarios. One example might be flagging suppliers at high risk of running short on a key component due to regulatory delays or tax changes.

Revisiting the risk management playbook

Too often, risk frameworks focus on classification without detailing the steps to respond. In contrast, a robust early warning system outlines clear next steps, who is responsible, what action to take, and how to follow up. These “next best actions” ensure that alarms lead to decisions, not just alerts.

Tax professionals are well equipped to help define these processes and integrate them into broader risk governance structures.

Tax as a partner

As global disruptions continue to reshape businesses, supply chain teams should look at tax teams as partners. Together they are no longer confined to compliance and reporting, tax teams have the tools, data, and perspective to be true partners in supply chain resilience.

By embedding tax professionals into supply chain strategy, companies can tap into powerful insights that reduce cost, manage risk, and improve responsiveness. Ultimately, strengthening supply chains through tax collaboration isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. The future belongs to companies that can adapt fast, respond smartly, and make resilience part of their strategy.

Transport Management Intelligence

Posted on 26 August, 202521 August, 2025 by David Priestman

When does it make sense to integrate transport management systems (TMS) with AI? What’s the right business case? David Priestman met with Alex Redmann, Sales Director of Soloplan, at Multimodal Birmingham, to find the answer.

“Interpret the right data, for example from the proof-of-delivery,” advises Redmann. “AI can verify documents, check if the P.O.D. is correct and its quality using optical character recognition (Document Intelligence function). This saves time and the checked data automatically goes into the right place in CarLo. (Soloplan’s TMS) When we speak to prospective customers they often say how long it takes to get P.O.D. discovery, so we need to discuss their current operations to show a new workflow and ROI.”

AI is just one of many tools, Redmann tells me. The new ‘Planning Radar’ in CarLo highlights proactive efficiency improvements, whether that be reduced empty distances, optimised vehicle utilisation or less planning effort. The functionality supports dispatchers in planning transport orders faster and more intelligently. The planning radar analyses all open transport orders in real time and displays the best possible combinations directly in the system. Results can be filtered by number and radius. The system automatically recognises previous and upcoming trips as well as return loads.

Intelligent Vehicle Search

Soloplan (which stands for Software Logistics Planning) takes an individualised configuration approach by customizing solutions. “We only have 1 TMS,” Redmann states, “but without changing source code we can change all the jobs in the system.” The company has 1700 worldwide customers, predominantly hauliers with fleets of 50-500 trucks, doing FTL and LTL, palletised, tank or bulk freight transport. There are 33000 CarLo users, supported by 260 Soloplan staff across seven offices in Germany, Spain, France, Poland and South Africa.

Its competition is not just other TMS providers, but spreadsheet usage by smaller hauliers. ”We look at how digitized a customer is and how many manual processes they have,” says Redmann, “to find the right resource for each job – such as route planning. Individual benefit outweighs data functionality.” Customers buy CarLo (Cargo Logistics) via a one-time license fee, rather than SaaS. This means a higher upfront cost, but lower total cost of ownership.

The new customer search in ‘Planning Radar’ automatically suggests clients for whom appropriate return loads have regularly been carried out in the past. If no match is found, freight exchanges such as TIMOCOM or Trans.eu can be connected to directly. Here as well, the return load search takes place automatically and with only one click. Some hauliers prefer to use their own network, some need external transport resources. The TMS integrates with telematics partners like Samsara and has additional features for WMS, fleet management, cross docking and driver communications.

After planning a trip, the Planning Radar, with its intelligent search functionality and chatbot, assists in finding the most suitable vehicle. Factors such as the proximity to the loading location, the costs per vehicle (weight, fuel consumption, wear and tear) or the properties of the semi-trailer (dumper, tank, tarpaulin, excess width) play a role. The transport company can specify the cost components per vehicle itself. Vehicles used in the past for similar combinations can be another criterion. This way, AI helps identify hidden optimisation potential which otherwise may have remained unrecognised.

The planning radar graphically displays suggestions on the map. The AI feed creates a window next to the map and checks all open transport orders in CarLo. Subsequently, all transport orders for which suggestions have been found are displayed there. Even less experienced dispatchers can plan better and more easily, while avoiding planning errors and staff do not have to deal with the data alone.