Abstract
Recent years have seen emerging trends in supply chain management that have determined a change in the role of warehouse and its related activities across the supply chain. Growing attention is placed on automation (‘how?’ and ‘when?’) and its return. Although automation in material handling systems began in the early ‘60s and ‘70, nowadays it is no more a matter of fashion or innovation: deciding whether to automate or not usually requires a deep investigation both on the factors to be considered before automating and on the activities to automate among storage, retrieval, order picking or sorting. This article presents the results of an in-depth survey carried out on automation in materials handling systems in Italian fast moving consumer goods industry.