With these rules, we are paving the way for drones to help in New Yorkers’ everyday lives—not just in emergency situations. Drones are going to allow us to make facade inspections faster and safer, help us inspect and maintain our bridges, tunnels, and critical infrastructure, and allow us to monitor our beaches more easily for unauthorized swimmers and hazardous conditions, among other things.
Interact Analysis research indicates warehouse construction is showing signs of recovering following a slowdown in 2022 and 2023. The slowdown in new warehouse construction was driven by a slowdown in e-commerce growth and higher interest rates, reducing the amount of capital flowing toward real estate developments. However, e-commerce growth rates are stabilizing and returning to pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, the supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19 are leading to a shift toward just-in-time supply chains, resulting in a need for greater storage capacity. It is expected e-commerce growth rates will soon return to double digits, but these are the early signs of recovery and in 2023 Interact Analysis predicted 25 percent fewer warehouses will be added to the global building stock compared with 2022. While some believe e-commerce sales are decreasing compared with the peak of the pandemic, this is misleading. Interact Analysis delved deeper and found e-commerce sales haven’t in fact come down despite seeing a declining share of e-commerce sales as a percentage of total retail sales. This is interesting as it suggests that demand for fulfillment capacity is likely to grow at a similar rate to that of pre-pandemic levels.
A $7.95 bottle of Bath & Body Works foaming hand soap used to take three months to put together. The pieces had to travel more than 13,000 miles from China, Canada and Virginia to the company’s Ohio distribution center. Bath & Body Works decided it needed to get new products to market more quickly. The result was a production initiative with little parallel in corporate America. The reshoring effort, which started in 2008, required a lot of negotiation with sometimes skeptical suppliers. The campus includes 10 manufacturers and millions of square feet of production and warehouse spaces, with 5,000 employees working there during peak production. Bath & Body Works had sales of $7.56 billion last year, increasing annual revenue by more than $2 billion since 2019.
That’s all for this week. Enjoy the weekend, and the song of the week, Changes by Tupac.
The post This Week in Logistics News (July 22 – 28) appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.