even Report #5: What you need to know about automated pallet storage
Automation rarely fails because of the technology. This report shows what really matters when it comes to pallets, systems and planning.
In 1961, representatives of European railway companies sat down together and agreed on a measurement: 1,200 by 800 millimetres. The occasion was about as unremarkable as it gets. They wanted to prevent empty load carriers from having to be transported back at great expense. That decision became one of the most effective standards in European economic history.
Today, almost all of warehouse logistics is calibrated to this measurement: stacker cranes, conveyor technology, shuttle systems, warehouse software. In a manual warehouse, a person simply compensates for small deviations. A slightly warped pallet, a loose board. It barely registers. The moment a warehouse runs in an automated mode, that very deviation suddenly carries real weight. A system fails to recognise the contour, diverts the load, and the material flow stalls. What was previously an annoyance becomes a costly disruption.
That is what even Report #5 addresses: the pallet as an underestimated foundation, the question of what actually causes automated warehouse projects to fail in practice, and the interplay of warehouse technology, conveyor technology and software that ultimately determines whether a system performs in day-to-day operations the way it was planned on paper.
Why a report on this topic?
Automated pallet warehouses are among the most expensive decisions in intralogistics, and among the decisions where ambition and reality can diverge the most. This report was developed with the people who plan and operate such projects: load carrier specialists, system integrators, software vendors, and a change management expert. The assessments come from them, not from a system integrator's brochure.
What to expect in the report
- Putting automation in context
- Why automation projects fall short of original expectations more often than the system integrator promises
- The role that overly optimistic assumptions about product range, volumes and process stability play in this
- Three questions for making a realistic assessment of your own starting position, even before the business case is calculated
A self-check for determining your own position
2. The pallet as a foundation
- Why the Euro pallet is the underestimated standard behind almost every warehouse logistics operation
- Dr. Philipp Hüning from Loopario: where load carriers structurally fall out of view between WMS, TMS and ERP, and what hidden costs this creates
Michael Brandt from EPAL in an interview: which quality criteria operators should define as early as the tender stage, so that an uncontrolled pallet mix does not slow down automated systems
3. Systems and software
- Gero Bockelmann from GEBHARDT: why warehouse technology, conveyor technology and software must be planned from the outset as one interconnected system, not sequentially
Dirk Teschner from Infios: what a WMS and a WCS must concretely deliver in a live pallet warehouse, from variable pallet dimensions and mixed pallets through to integration with yard and transport management
4. Market overview & outlook
- A market map of vendors in pallet automation
- Four developments that will shape the topic most strongly in future: labour shortages, site consolidation, the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation PPWR, and AI-supported storage forecasts
- Change management expert Imke Leith in an interview: why automation projects fail due to middle management more often than due to the technology
- A quote series featuring forecasts from our authors
Many thanks for the valuable input from:
Loopario, EPAL, GEBHARDT Fördertechnik GmbH, Infios GmbH and Imke Leith for the interview.
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