This Month in Modern

This year marks the 70th year that Modern Materials Handling has been published.

As we’ve been covering the last few years, the ability to design and implement a dynamic, flexible, automated distribution facility—one able to bend and respond to demand and cut freight costs—is a critical element to success in meeting the multichannel fulfillment challenge brought on by the evolution of e-commerce.

Once locked neatly into its own silo, the continued momentum of e-commerce has turned the spotlight on packing processes and technologies as an increasingly fickle customer-base—both retail and B2B—has forced the hand of fulfillment operations to pick single-line, single-piece orders and ship smaller, more frequent deliveries.

This month in Modern, Trebilcock gives us his next Big Picture, one that represents a logical progression based on automation’s unmistakable importance in our new world. He digs into the emerging best practice of maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) in materials handling.

Modern's annual lift truck issue takes a look at how CN manages mobile crane maintenance, the Top 20 lift truck suppliers, a look at the results of our annual reader survey, a state of the fuel cell market, and more.

This month, Trebilcock continues his Big Picture series with “5 ways to handle peak demand,” a closer look at how the rise of e-commerce, more frequent promotions, and competitive service-level agreements are creating more peak periods than ever before.

Fantatics has grown into the leading online retailer for officially licensed sports merchandise for professional and college sports teams. Today, Fanatics stocks 500,000 SKUs and has to be prepared for wild swings in demand that range from 30,000 units a day to 500,000 units during peak periods like the Final Four and the Super Bowl—and ship those units with only seconds left on the clock.

Around this time of year it’s natural to want to look back at the last 12 months to gain perspective on where we’ve been and where we’re going as an industry.

If you like research, and you know we do, then you’re going to love this issue of Modern.

This month in Modern, we fix the spotlight on packaging, a topic that’s now clearly top of mind for savvy materials handling professionals working in the evolving retail sector—and rightfully so.

For the third year running, the Modern editorial staff is using a majority of our August pages to celebrate the backbone, the workhorse, the most fundamental piece of equipment to be found in any materials handling operation—yet one that all too often gets taken for granted or run to the point of disintegration: the lift truck.

This month, we shift the focus just a bit onto the unique challenges facing the beverage distribution market. This industry, historically characterized by lift trucks, floor storage and manual palletizing, now finds itself in the middle of a materials handling transformation all its own.

This month in Modern we fix the spotlight on the gradual, but steady application of a lift truck fleet management program that’s now driving impressive productivity gains and generating considerable cost savings for the folks at Scotts Miracle-Gro.

While many of us are still buzzing from one of the busiest ProMat events in recent memory, this month in Modern we pull our focus in a bit and concentrate on the little things that are making a big difference inside materials handling operations—especially in light of the increasing adoption of high-speed order fulfillment systems.

Over the next three months, executive editor Bob Trebilcock will continue this coverage by looking at three retailers that are redefining their categories and their operations by applying highly automated distribution systems to meet the needs of a demanding, ever-fickle online consumer.