The two biggest challenges in the supply chain today are the labor shortage and changing consumer demand, says George Koutsaftes, president and chief executive officer of Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions.

“If every job [in the U.S.] that was open today was filled with unemployed workers, you would still have over 4 million jobs unfilled,” he says.

The second challenge comes from dealing with the “whipsaw” effect from wild fluctuations in supply, added to changing consumer demand, Koutsaftes says. “More and more consumers are expecting more from retailers. And the complexity of the demand is creating challenges for our customers, retailers and the supply chain overall.” 

The pace of disruption and volatility is not going to slow down any time soon, he adds. Helping companies cope involves making the most of technology. “More so today than ever before, software, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to create a bigger and bigger role in helping supply chain leaders,” Koutsaftes says. “We have to enable our supply chain customers to design, simulate and emulate their outcomes based upon their own data, and continue to grab data off of their operations, to become smarter and more predictive.”

This, says Koutsaftes, is where the industry's going and where it needs to go. “It makes robotic solutions, material handling solutions and workers more agile in their operations.”

Also important is interoperability, or the ability to take discreet assets — whether a robot, material handling asset, or even a worker — then having a warehouse execution software layer that allows for the effective handoff of those assets in a simulated, seamless manner. “Many industry consultants and analysts estimate you can pretty much double the capacity and output of the supply chain just through efficient handoff and planning of those assets,” Koutsaftes says.