While at ProMat 2025, one thing was apparent: physical automation is everywhere, and it is exciting. Streamlining warehouses and distribution centers for efficiently picking and packing orders was at the forefront, with autonomous forklifts, smart cranes and racking (ASRS), autonomous mobile robots (AMR) bringing bins to an employee for picking, and more.
As I listened to AI Driven Warehousing and Revolutionizing Logistics, business process automation and collaboration are still lacking, pointed out as concerns that don’t have short-term solutions.
The pain points surrounding broken collaboration and business process processes were particularly evident in:
The most successful companies foster collaboration as very few workflows are truly siloed only involving one functional group.
As an example, Sales success often relies on Marketing, Merchandising, Supply Chain, Legal, and others. When all of these groups work together and have visibility into upstream and downstream work being done, it provides more efficient and thorough outcomes.
I worked with a large retailer that regularly had their Marketing and Merchandising groups each create a plan on a page and would come together one week before each event to share with the broader group. Months of planning were involved with each operating without visibility to the other group until only 7 days prior to go-live. This created many fires, late nights, scrambling to try and bridge gaps between the two group’s plans. Mind you, they hadn’t even begun to involve supply chain and distribution to ensure the products were available and fulfillment planned for.
Bringing together technology, people, and data necessary to complete tasks and manage workloads reduces operation costs, headaches, and is proven to drive better business results.
Along with these pain points, these sessions highlighted opportunities for competitive advantages using advanced business technologies.
Customer expectations continue to grow; they want real-time visibility into their orders, which has proven tricky. While some organizations have made improvements over the past decade like the occasional daily email notification, the current expectation is similar to Uber and seeing the package location on demand in real-time. This is still a miss.
What would this look like? Imagine you ordered a new car and it’s being built for you. Now think of how engaged the customer would be if they knew this week assembly was under the hood, next week was interior, the following week was exterior. Next, imagine if they could see the build in process via onsite cameras that exist on the manufacturing floor all while tracking the key milestones that get them to picking up the car at the dealership on the date promised.
Pretty amazing, right? It is possible, it’s just not being done, currently. I like to call this a profit-driver differentiator.
Similarly, the relationship with vendors is currently mostly transactional for most of these firms. Your inventory is running low, so procurement gets engaged to order more.
What if vendors had visibility to see your inventory and you could see your vendors inventory? Vendors could proactively look at your inventory levels vs. their supply and vice versa. I think back to the chip shortage of 2020 and how it took several years for manufacturers to catch up once they received the necessary chips. There could be obvious winners if there was a tighter partnership based on collaboration and trust.
This can significantly optimize short-term planning for the next month/quarter - again driving profit.
Being able to adjust quickly and respond to changes is a competitive advantage. Doing all of this better than your competition? Truly sets you apart both with your vendors and with your customers to ensure you are who they want to do business with in the long-term.
I enjoyed listening and learning at ProMat 2025, as well as marveling at all the robotic advancements. Would you like to continue the conversation? Book time with me.