Global labour pressures, including rising wages and tighter workforce safety requirements, have accelerated supply chain automation. And yet there is one critical area that remains heavily reliant on manual expertise: the loading area. With global instability limiting mobility and reinforcing labour shortages, Wouter Satijn explains why loading automation is now vital to improve safety, increase speed and eliminate supply chain bottlenecks…

Unmanageable Demand for Resources

The war in the Middle East is creating global disruption, affecting shipping routes and leading to spiralling prices. But it is also highlighting the worldwide lack of staff willing and able to undertake high risk, high stress manual activity, most notably within the loading area. Organisations reliant upon large numbers of workers migrating in and out of affected countries to handle jobs such as the loading and unloading of goods from warehouses and production sites are facing a serious operational challenge.

Yet this problem has been emerging for years. Figures from The Conference Board (Aug 2024),  suggested the US economy alone required 4.6 million additional workers per year to maintain current levels of supply, demand and population balance. Shortages are endemic, from Germany  to South Korea and China, and labour-intensive models are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

The issue is not simply a lack of resources. Economic changes globally have led to rising employment costs, while employee protection rules have also become far more stringent and consistent globally. It is simply not possible to rely on large numbers of workers to undertake manual activity, such as loading and unloading trucks.

Escalating Cost and Risk

The dangers associated with forklift trucks are well documented: forklift collisions with fixed objects cause 22% of workplace fatalities, while almost 35,000 non-fatal injuries occur annually due to forklift overturn. With incorrect load handling (35%), improper training (20%), and distracted operation (15%) as the leading operator error causes, it is inevitable that the risk of pedestrian collisions, tip overs and load falls rises when workers are under pressure, under-resourced or under-skilled. Plus, of course, many items, such as Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries are both inherently dangerous and heavy to handle.

Furthermore, the high level of automation across the supply chain in recent years, especially within warehouses and factories, has radically increased throughput and demand. With loading and unloading docks becoming a bottleneck, these highly manual locations are under ever increasing pressure to increase throughput, adding inevitable risk and stress to the workforce.

Loading Automation Imperative

The imperative now is to achieve a far more efficient, faster and safer loading operation, which means less reliance on manual interventions. Automated loading systems, for example, remove the need for forklifts. Staff numbers are reduced and individuals undertake a lower risk, supervisory role rather than physically handling goods, further reducing the risks to employees associated with dangerous loads.

In addition, automated loading also significantly cuts the time required to load or unload a truck, typically from 45 minutes to less than 10 minutes. As a result, the loading bay is no longer a bottleneck, further reducing the pressure on staff working in this area. Indeed, creating a far more efficient loading operation also allows organisations to explore more agile production and logistics models in response to external events, without the constraints associated with over reliance on unavailable physical resources.

By focusing on automation in the loading dock, organisations can improve worker safety, ensuring all operations globally are in line with the highest level of employee protection requirements. They can achieve the agility and resilience required not only to weather the current geopolitical storm but to provide a foundation for achievable scale. And, critically, they can remove the corporate risk associated with an over reliance on a manual workforce that is simply no longer available.