Are we heading towards a world where next day delivery or same day is the necessity? This is one of the themes that jumps out this week, as Waitrose rolls out its same-day service across London and a UK logistics provider launches a next-day service on Sundays.
As this story about Ocado offering one-hour delivery in West London also shows, piloting such a service in a limited geographical area and gradually expanding it may be the model for many retailers.
As Ocado itself demonstrates, automating as much as possible is one way to meet this downward pressure. We write about five warehouse functions that can be automated, using examples from the likes of Amazon. UPS has ambitious goals for its automated centres this year, as we report.
GFS’s commercial director has contributed an opinion piece on what the company learned from peak season 2018.
We have a round-up of stories you may have missed, from FedEx using the network of 2016 acquisition TNT to offer a faster European delivery service to Amazon signalling its ambitions in the logistics space.
Albert Heijn is retiring click and collect points and opening a new home delivery fulfilment centre and we look at the cost-benefit analysis of H&M investing in new logistics centres. Meanwhile, Parcelhub has launched a fulfilment service.
