Inside a Shanghai warehouse the size of seven football fields, hundreds of robots pack roughly 200,000 boxes each day and ship them to customers across China. Four humans babysit.

Instead of displacing American workers, robots may soon make many of their jobs more efficient.

Forklift sales are up and continuing to rise. In the North American market, 2017 sales were up 9.5 percent over 2016, reaching a new benchmark of 253,146 units sold.

Investor interest in building and acquiring warehouses in the age of Amazon.com Inc. is overheating, and there might be more distribution centers created than there will be tenants to fill them, billionaire Sam Zell said.

For Prologis Inc., the world's largest warehouse owner, the biggest challenge to growth has been acquiring land in the markets most important to its e-commerce tenants. The solution: Buy a rival.

When Bert Hooper brings on new workers at TechStyle Fashion Group’s 450,000 square-foot warehouse in Perris, California, he tells them, “If you know how to use a smartphone and you know how to use an app, you can do about any operation that we have in our facility.”

If anything is in constant flux, it is manufacturing and supply chain. MODEX 2018 is the best venue to showcase the services, products and solutions needed to meet the challenges these two vital areas face.