MODEX C-Suite Q&A: Sean Wallingford, President, Warehouse Solutions, North America, Vanderlande

Sean Wallingford - President, Warehouse Solutions, North America - Vanderlande

Q: What is your number one takeaway from Modex 2022?

Wallingford: It’s definitely the current labor situation, the unavailability of labor and how it’s impacting our customers’ ability to run their operations. Simply finding labor has become so mission-critical that it’s driving a lot of urgency and a lot of the decision making right now. Business cases for automation that might not have worked just a few years ago are now very easy to justify. It’s driving more companies to invest in high-level automation because they just can’t find people. This was acute for the last few years but now it’s widespread; it’s an issue that no one can afford to ignore.

Q: What are the three key market trends from your perspective?

Wallingford: For starters, I think we’ve gotten to the realm where robotics work. That should be key with all of the investment that’s been pouring into the space over the last 4-5 years and it was pretty evident at Modex. This is exciting for the industry because it’s another tool that we have to continue to minimize companies’ reliance on labor and add more flexibility and resiliency to their operations—especially during the last few years of the global pandemic. 

We’re also seeing more companies dealing with a lack of available land for warehouses and DCs. This wasn’t really an issue in the US up until the last few years, but it’s one that we’ve been dealing with in Europe for a while. Getting good building space for DCs close to commercial centers and big cities is a huge challenge. It’s forcing a lot of companies that would have normally installed more traditional systems to build “up” instead of “out.”

Finally, we’re seeing consolidation from multiple sites into pure omnichannel sites. As most of our customer networks continue to evolve, the average system size has just really blown up. It’s a good thing because it drives more throughput with less people, but these are now bigger, longer projects; it’s a new skill set for both customers and integrators to perfect.

Q: How is Vanderlande responding to these market trends?

Wallingford:We’ve announced the partnership with RightHand Robotics, and we’ll be announcing a few other collaborations in 2022. We’re finding that customers want robotics that work and that are both integrated and complementary to the overall solution, and aren’t just “bolted on.” We’re also focusing on a best-of-breed approach with standard solutions, versus experimenting for experimentation’s sake.

Very rarely do we see a cross-dock facility or something similar to that anymore. Almost all operations have shuttles, AGVs, AVs, pallet runners, cranes and other tools focused on minimizing reliance on labor. We also have large integrated systems—like our STOREPICK and FASTPICK—that significantly drive down labor requirements. We’ve been aligning our portfolio around standard offerings for the last few years, and some of those include small footprint buildings and our ADAPTO roaming shuttle, for example, which uses significantly less floor space.

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