Trends and challenges facing warehouse and distribution centres

Our topic is on Trends and challenges facing warehouse and distribution centres. Before we begin, let us just look at the definition of the terms warehouse and distribution centre.
1) Warehouse: Commercial building for storage of goods until demanded by customer.
2) Distribution Centre: Warehouse that is specially for goods with rapid movement.

These are the areas that we will be talking about are mentioned below:
1) The building.
2) Product/goods identification.
3) Market trends.

1) The building.
In The past, warehouses are made of bricks. The brick walls made it very difficult for expansion of the warehouse. This has caused poor inventory management and slow shipping in and out of goods. Now, warehouses are made of steel. The advantages are listed below.

• Shorter Construction Time
• Lower Construction / Material Costs
• Inexpensive & Easy to Expand
• Durable & Weather Resistant
• Energy Efficient
• Environmentally Responsible
• Insurance Advantages
• Minimal Maintenance
• Single Source Assurance
• Attractive Finish

Expansion of a steel-made warehouse is briefly stated out below.

• Remove an end-wall.
• Add as much space as you want.
• Seal it off with your original end-wall.

As you can see, expansion of the steel-made warehouse is much easier and it can be accomplished without disrupting interior operations.

2) Product/goods identification.
Barcode is one very common way of identifying different products. Barcode is something that everyone knows about, the bottle of drink we buy from the supermarket has been barcoded, the book we buy from the bookstore has been barcoded, many different examples of barcoding and many of which are very close to us.
Types of barcode:

• linear barcodes.
• 2D barcodes.

Over the years, disadvantages of barcodes have been discovered. One of it would be when the barcode has scratched, it could not read by the scanner/barcode reader because it is already damaged.

Now, radio-frequency identification (RFID) is more commonly used. Advantages of RFID are listed below:

• RFID tags do not require a direct line of sight.
• RFID tags can be read at much greater distances.
• RFID readers can read RFID tags much faster.
  
• RFID tags can be read/write devices.
  

3) Market Trends.
Due to the changing market trends, issues such as buying behaviour of customer and the service levels demanded by customers has changed the way warehouse and distribution centres work. With different purchasing concepts being used over the years, concepts like Just-in-Time, Bulk buying, Forward buyging, Hand-to-mouth, warehouses and distribution centres have changed the way they operate. The equipment used in the warehouse and distribution centres have changed and improved. The design of the warehouse and distribution centre, 'Through' flow and 'U' flow, has been affected by the market trends.

These are some of the trends and challenged that are faced by warehouses and distribution centre that we have researched about.