This week our sustainability and logistics teams attended IntraLogisteX 2025, the UK’s leading sustainable supply chain and warehouse logistics event held at Birmingham’s NEC.
This year’s exhibition was co-located alongside the Sustainable Supply Chain Exhibition and the Robotics and Automation Exhibition. The conference was attended by thought leaders and experts, providing an excellent opportunity to observe the latest trends and developments in the space.
Our sustainability and logistics teams gained real-world insights from sessions delivered by industry experts, while using the invaluable opportunity to network with specialists in the sustainability field.
Here are our key takeaways from the conference:
- There is constant demand for automation to de-risk operations and provide improved supply chain resilience
- Modular warehouse automation continues to grow in popularity as it provides increased flexibility in future capacity and configuration
- Adopting technology that can adapt to future business needs is key, while bridging the gap between theoretical and practical performance remains a challenge
- Often in logistics focus naturally falls on transport, but especially with the adoption of new technologies businesses need to think about the impact of activities within the warehouse such as energy consumption, stewardship of materials, and packaging.
- A collaborative approach is crucial for driving sustainable change in supply chains because businesses are dependent on their partners to deliver the changes needed. Starting from the point of selection, sustainability performance as well as emphasis on sharing best practices, resources and innovations must be included as well as operational performance improvement.
- Technological innovation was a key topic of discussion. Various thought leaders highlighted the influence of technology on developing resilient supply chains and enhancing operational efficiency
- AMR (autonomous mobile robots) continue to expand into the middle ground between manual and fully automated operations, increasingly as an integral part of large-scale automation solutions. However, automated picking adoption is slower than predicted. Despite all the technological advances, robot arms and vision systems currently struggle to compete with the human body as regards speed, dexterity and error resolution.
A number of these key themes came out in our Operations Outlook 2025 research report, so it was great to see these borne out in our discussions.
We were delighted to connect with the many attendees who visited our stand for engaging discussions on diverse topics such as logistics cost and service optimisation, warehouse automation, sustainability roadmaps, and carbon reduction strategies to explore our approaches for sustainability transformation and overcoming supply chain planning challenges.
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