- Zebra asked warehouse operators their opinion of sharing their work space with technology and the majority were favorable about the data that technologies such as RFID can provide them with.
- The Warehouse Vision Study aimed to nail down the trends in warehousing and what role RFID could play within the growing pressure in this environment.
Technologies company Zebra focuses on the front-line operators when designing their supply chain solutions. That’s why their recent warehouse vision study “Elevating Every Move: The Formula for High Performance Warehousing,” questioned those working in the warehouses themselves, in addition to management, about how technology can improve operations. Zebra’s customer success director Randy Dunn calls it a human-centric approach to IoT technology in logistics.
Surprisingly to the authors of the report, they found that workers as well as managers are eager for more technology. Most frontline warehouse workers that were queried said they support technology at their workplace, to boost safety, efficiency and improve the value of their work.
The report was intended to explore trends and sentiments driving technology decisions and spending in warehouses. The results found frontline workers expressed benefits of automating warehouse operations—and illustrated the risks of not automating fast enough.
Key Report Findings
Among other key points, the survey found that 85 percent of warehouse operators say, “If my employer does not invest in technology to improve warehouse operations, we will not meet business objectives.” Those questioned also indicated at a rate of 74 percent that they were concerned they are spending too much time on tasks that could be automated.
Another 72 percent of associates are concerned about safety on the (increasingly busy) warehouse floor with 70 percent specifically worried about injuries. Another 69 percent of warehouse workers reported there is a lack of qualified staff on the floor and expressed concerns about fatigue and physical exhaustion.
Challenges Facing Management
More than half of the managers surveyed found it challenging to maintain proper staffing levels, and another 47 percent said preparing orders according to service level agreements (SLAs), with order accuracy and outbound processes were the top two operational challenges.
Increased e-commerce activity is making “faster delivery to the end-customer” a top challenge for warehouse teams, even as technology use is on the rise.
As the logistics company’s customers’ expectations rise, and warehouse operator staffing becomes more challenging, those workers said they would prefer to have collaborative support from robots (88 percent), ergonomic mobile devices (88 percent), communications applications with RFID (87 percent), and task management tools (91 percent) to help solve workplace issues.
Ninety-three percent of associates agreed the increased availability of automation and mobile technologies would help attract and retain more warehouse associates and 89 percent said they feel more valued by their employers when provided with technology tools and automation designed to help them.
Knowing Where Inventory Is
There are so many things that frontline workers are being asked to do in warehouses, including “things they wish could, and should, be, automated today,” said Andres Boullosa, Zebra’s director of supply chain warehouse global vertical strategies. “It’s good to hear so many warehouse leaders plan to digitize, automate and add intelligence to their frontline operations, and we are here to help.”
The warehouse vision survey follows a similar one in 2023 with a focus this time on cold-chain supply companies that manage food products. Last year’s study helped Zebra engineers understand how their technology is being used in the real world. Boullosa pointed out the key point to the 2025 study is the evolution of Zebra’s relationship with frontline workers with technology. In the past frontline workers are not necessarily receptive to technology, following the common view that technology would be used to replace them.
“We know labor challenges continue to be out there related to attracting and retaining skilled workers so this actually is telling decision makers: your workers want technology,” he stated. “They want to be effective, and this is a way of actually attracting them and retaining them.”
The favorability to technology is not a question of youth. In fact, the majority of the operators who responded positively about technology use were between 36 and 50 years old. “My hypothesis was that these are younger workers, who are more technology savvy. That does not seem to be the case based on this survey,” offered Boullosa.
Assisting with Human Centric Tasks
Companies that want to continue to invest in innovation should focus on technology accomplishing more human centric tasks. “It’s less capital intensive with quicker implementation to put automation in charge of work that was being done manually,” said Boullosa.
To meet concerns about supply chains, warehouses need to be more flexible and adaptable to respond to the changing demands of their customers. Managers are looking at automation in logistics as it is changing, supporting the operators for instance.
The study compared responses from businesses in Asia Pacific, North and Latin America and Europe as safety certainly continues to be “paramount” said Boullosa. In some regions of Europe and Latin America the concern was centered around actually mitigation of mistakes. In these warmer climates, where fresh produce may be handled, ensuring product is not delayed at a dock door is the primary concern. Additionally, technology helps with avoiding fatigue, which could lead to driver-error based injuries, the survey respondents said.
Technology offers three layers of support —improving safety, making work more efficient and being more accurate. One feature RFID offers, Dunn pointed out, “is precision of knowledge what inventory is onsite.” Another layer he pointed to is the analytics-support it can provide, based on identifying a shipment. In that way, it can help management understand movement and location for subsequent process planning.
Analytics to Improve Processes
“I think the most interesting option is using serialization to trace processes. When something’s got a really unique, individual identity you can follow that all the way through a process and score that process,” Dunn said. “So you have an expectation about how the process is going to perform and now you can start to actually measure that without [the labor involved in measuring time spent] a lot of data capture intervention from your associates.”
Management can begin to examine the process and how efficient it is. RFID can help a manager consider what is the efficient approach. “It’s about doing different things, and what can I stop doing,” explained Dunn.
For this function, Dunn said, “I do believe that RFID’s going to play a really big role,” to help managers make processes more streamlined.
“I think this study demonstrates that people that are working on the frontline in the warehouses don’t want to do mundane things, they don’t want to do nonproductive things and they don’t want to do dangerous things,” said Boullona.
Reinventing Processes
One example Zebra officials pointed to is RevLogical, a Kansas City freight forwarder. RevLogical has designed its own solution using RFID data to manage the flow of goods in its fast-paced site. Tagged freight is identified automatically as it arrives on site. As the company’s efficiency rose, its inventory accuracy has neared 100 percent.
By using RFID data to understand trends, managers can reinvent their own processes. “How do I stop assigning mundane nonproductive and dangerous tasks to my operators,” Dunn pointed out. By tracking what each process looks like, “you can reinvent the way you operate in these mega facilities I think that’s a really interesting opportunity for RFID.”
The next question, Dunn posed, “is now that I’ve got the RFID data what can I do with AI? That’s one of the interesting things RFID enables. Once you get the data now obviously you want to do analytics you want to do much more real time visibility where possible.” Managers can then focus on improving their operational excellence.
Staying Agile with Close Proximity Demands
Dunn pointed to another trend Zebra, has been tracking—industries pushing tasks and production further up the value chain closer to the point when an order is placed.
“These cycles are shortening and the way that you execute on that, you need to have the ability to understand and make commitments and promises that are much more precise,” said Dunn.
For instance, with RFID data, a warehouse knows where the goods that are being ordered are located. “What we’re trying to do on the tech side is take proven technologies that maybe don’t have proven use cases and bring them to potential users and the study is saying there’s an appetite for the kind of RFID technology Zebra has developed,” he said. “Other companies can benefit from the fact that merchandise probably is already coming with RFID tags on it, so it’s just a matter of you getting the readers, to be much more accurate in the receiving and managing the inventory process.”
Being Flexible Around Threats of Inflation
“In a world where all of a sudden the costs are something one day and then may cost 25 percent more the next day—you need a resilient supply chain and so there’s got to be a lot of agility and resilience being built into these supply chains,” said Dunn. “RFID and its unique capabilities are going to play a major role in enabling that flexibility and adaptability.”
Being able to support customers as they place orders quickly could mitigate any negative impact of inflation.
“People are watching prices,” he said. “This a time to provide them with fail-proof ordering, without any instability in the supply. At the end of the day you ensure that everything is in place with very strict control that everything that they handle is RFID tagged goods. The goods already are digitally identifiable.”
Helping the Connected Frontline Worker
Zebra offers the mobile computer for the frontline worker handling those goods, offering technologies “that support automation of tasks in order to remove the human effort, think about robotics such and overhead/portal RFID tag readers,” Dunn stated.
“People have spent years understanding the value of RFID at supply chain level,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, everybody’s thinking: ‘that isn’t the state-of-the-art anymore and there are folks that are doing this way more interestingly, how can I improve the speed, quality and profitability of my supply chain’?”
For officials at Zebra, the survey results confirm that a connected frontline worker with a human centric automation this is the way the way to go.
“Zebra’s got this crisp vision about who our customer is, and it’s the frontline worker – they ultimately deliver customer satisfaction and productivity to organization,” said Dunn. “So when you start with that frontline worker and work back to what needs to change in order to make their job more effective. I think that is such a bright guiding light for Zebra and it’s what makes Zebra pretty unique in the space.”