It’s Wednesday 5th April which means one thing – the start of eDelivery Expo (EDX) alongside its sister event InternetRetailing Expo (IRX), both of which will be held at Birmingham’s NEC over the next two days.
Yours truly and the rest of the eDelivery and InternetRetailing staff will be at the event covering the sessions, organising interviews and catching up with delegates and there’s still time for you to register and attend so do get here if you can.
For those of you who can’t make it we will be covering the sessions and main news on eDelivery.net over the next few days and will bring you the news in full in next week’s newsletter too.
Meanwhile this week the latest figures from the IRMG MetaPack UK Delivery Index show that on-time rates are down but next day deliveries continue to take a greater share of delivery options, overtaking standard options in February.
In an effort to ramp up speed pizza giant Domino’s has become one of the latest companies to adopt a pilot with autonomous robots developer Starship Technologies, citing the fact that with its current 5 to 10 year growth plans it simply wouldn’t have the delivery driver capacity without looking at alternative delivery options such as this.
The worry of labour scarcity is also evident in anticipation of a post-Brexit world and in a timely opinion piece this week Eiratech Robotics’ Alexey Tabolkin suggests that robotics could also offer a solution in labour resource planning too.
Retailers are increasingly looking for efficiencies from their providers and for them to do more for them as they move to tighter delivery timeframes then ever. Walker Logistic this week announced the opening of two new re-work centres as it looks to combine the requirements of retailers under one supplier, reducing double handling costs. Meanwhile Zebra Technologies has announced a new tool that it says will improve the vacant space inside trailers, thereby reducing fuel, wasted miles and improving efficiency.
And this week we also report on two major contract wins. DX announced a £10 million a year contract to supply bespoke logistics services for beauty company Avon UK whilst Kerry Logistics announced it was to provide global freight forwarding services for homewares retailer Lakeland.
Hope to see you all at EDX!
