even Report #5: What You Need to Know About Automated Pallet Storage
Automation rarely fails because of 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 dimension: 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 the entire warehousing and logistics industry is calibrated to this dimension: aisle-changing storage and retrieval machines, conveyor technology, shuttle systems, warehouse software. In a manual warehouse, a person easily compensates for small deviations. A slightly warped pallet, a loose board. these things barely matter. As soon as a warehouse runs on automation, exactly these deviations suddenly carry serious weight. A system fails to recognise the contour, diverts the pallet, and material flow comes to a halt. 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 why automated warehouse projects actually fail in practice, and the interplay of storage technology, conveyor technology and software that ultimately determines whether a system in daily operation performs as 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 most widely. This report was developed with the people who plan and operate projects like these: load carrier specialists, system integrators, software vendors, a change management expert. The insights come from them, not from a system builder's brochure.
What to expect in the report
- Putting automation in context
- Why automation projects more often fall short of original expectations than system integrators promise
- The role that overly optimistic assumptions about product range, volumes and process stability play in this
- Three questions for realistically assessing your own starting point even before the business case calculation
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 warehousing and 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 generates
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 storage technology, conveyor technology and software must be planned as one interconnected system from the very beginning, not one after the other
Dirk Teschner from Infios: what a WMS and a WCS must concretely deliver in an operating 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 this topic most strongly in the future: labour shortages, site consolidation, the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation PPWR, and AI-supported storage forecasting
- Change management expert Imke Leith in an interview: why automation projects fail more often because of middle management than because of technology
- A collection of quotes with 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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