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Consumers were projected to spend upwards of $682 billion during the 2017 holiday season, with 51% shopping online, according to the National Retail Federation. Thanks to e-commerce giant Amazon, consumers also expected their packages to arrive within one to two days, regardless of the retailer or parcel carrier. To keep up with this demand (which can be substantial all year long, not just during the holiday season!) and get packages out the door faster, warehouses and distribution centers across the country are implementing dimensioning technology to gain efficiencies.

Major shipping carriers like FedEx, UPS, and USPS have adjusted their policies regarding charging based on parcel dimensions vs. weight, setting the industry standard. Cubing or dimensioning solutions allow the warehousing industry to capture data and proportions of products so shipping costs can be predicted with much greater accuracy.

I’ve been a business owner in the warehousing industry for more than a decade now, and the labor shortage issue has never been more prevalent.

At the beginning of the year there was more than 12.5 billion square feet of industrial space across the U.S., and this will only grow as an excess of 200 million square feet is currently under construction. Add to that the growth in ecommerce, which is expected to grow to $4 trillion by 2020. As warehouses grow and expand, the need for workers becomes increasingly critical. But who's going to do the work if your business is not ready to heavily invest in automation and robotics?

Like most logistics operations, yours might point to “receiving” as the main starting point in your operation. Either because it’s a process that often begins earlier in the day with the overnight arrival of trucks delivering products from all parts of the country, or simply because it’s the point in which materials enter your facility thus setting the stage for all other processes.