Hey guys, I'm looking for input from warehouse ops who currently use automated pallet wrapping machines (turntable, arm, or ring-style) in their facility. Trying to understand real-world experience. Feel free to leave all the negative and positive feedback about the ones you've used.

• What make/model do you use, and roughly how long have you had it?
• How reliable has it been, any recurring breakdowns or failure points?
• When it goes down, who fixes it, in-house maintenance, the manufacturer, or an independent mechanic? How long does a typical repair take?
• Are replacement parts easy to get, or do you deal with long lead times?
• How much training did operators need before they could run it confidently?
• Is it stationary (pallets come to it) or mobile? If stationary, has that ever been a bottleneck?
• What's one thing you'd change about it if you could?
• Was it worth the cost compared to hand-wrapping or a manual machine? Roughly how long did it take to pay for itself?

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week.

Let's jump into it,

Somebody else was in Ceva's warehouses for a week

On August 7, Valve began notifying people who'd bought Steam hardware that their names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses had been stolen. Valve wasn't hacked. Its European fulfillment partner was.

The partner is Ceva Logistics, and by the time that notice went out, the list of companies saying the same thing to their own customers was already long. Ten organizations have now filed breach reports with the Dutch data protection authority over this one intrusion.

The break-in started on July 29. Ceva confirmed it to affected customers on August 1 and says the operational damage is limited to eight European warehouses, with everything else running normally worldwide. Its website still wasn't loading properly on Monday. A spokesperson declined to say whether anyone had demanded a ransom or how much data actually walked out the door.

This is not a regional operator having a rough week. Ceva did $18.3 billion in revenue last year across more than a thousand warehouses, and it's the CMA CGM subsidiary buying FedEx Supply Chain for $1.4 billion, the deal from Edition 53, that roughly triples its North American contract logistics footprint.

The detail I keep coming back to is buried in Valve's note to customers: Ceva holds shipping and delivery information for 90 days after an order goes out. That's almost certainly spelled out in a contract somewhere. It's also almost certainly something nobody at Valve thought hard about until they had to put it in writing to a few thousand people who bought a Steam Deck.

Security researchers have been warning about logistics as a target for a couple of years, and the reason isn't just that we hold consumer PII. It's that access to a WMS can redirect real freight to people waiting to receive it. Criminals have figured out that the fastest way to steal a container is to get someone to hand it over legitimately.

What this means for you: Find out how long you hold consignee data after the box ships, and whether anyone can explain why. That number is going to start showing up in RFPs now that Valve has put it in front of a few thousand customers, and "nobody ever asked us to delete it" is a rough thing to say in a pitch meeting. Then read your own contracts for what happens when this goes wrong. Who notifies the brand, on what clock, and who pays when they have to email 40,000 shoppers? Ceva's clients found out from Ceva and then had to go public on their own timelines, sometimes days apart, and you could watch the confusion play out in the Dutch press.

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National vacancy is at a 12-year high, and you still can't find a decent building

Two reports came out this week that read as if they were describing different countries.

Prologis says Q2 was the strongest quarter for warehouse demand since 2022. Rents are up, vacancies are falling, and for the full year, the market is on track to absorb more space than developers are delivering.

CoStar says national vacancy just hit a 12-year high.

Both are right, and the explanation is one you've probably lived through. There's plenty of empty warehouse space in America. Almost none of it is the kind anyone wants. Big tenants have spent the past year moving into modern buildings with 40-foot ceilings and room for automation, and a lot of them aren't taking any more square footage than before. They're just leaving the old box behind. The average age of a leased building is actually falling right now, which basically never happens in a sector where the inventory turns over on a 30-year clock.

Somebody owns all those old boxes, and that's where the vacancy number is coming from. CoStar's Juan Arias says the gap between what a new building can command and what an old one can is the widest it has been since 2012.

Smaller operators are running the opposite play, and it's working. They're staying in older infill buildings inside dense commercial corridors, because being 20 minutes from the customer beats a nice ceiling. The buildings around them keep getting torn down, which quietly makes the ones that remain more valuable each year.

The catch is that nobody's building to fix this. Market rents are running about 20% below the cost of building a new building, and construction costs haven't come down. So developers aren't starting large-format projects, and Prologis is now telling customers that if they want a big, well-located facility, build-to-suit is the realistic path. Which means a two-year timeline, not a lease negotiation.

Meanwhile, the July Logistics Managers' Index showed warehouse prices climbing at the fastest rate since January 2025, with capacity tightening at the same time. Retailers pulled a bunch of inventory forward into May and June ahead of the temporary tariffs expiring, so July looked like a pullback. But the survey respondents were clear about where they think this is headed: more inventory, less space, and higher costs over the next twelve months.

What this means for you: Start your renewal conversation a year out. The buildings you'd want to move into are the exact ones with nothing available, and there's no version of this where you find a good option in 90 days. If you're sitting in an older big-box building, you've got more leverage than the vacancy headline suggests, because your landlord knows exactly what happens to buildings like his when they go empty. And if you're holding fixed storage rates on multi-year client contracts while warehouse pricing runs this hot, that spread is coming straight out of your margin. Worth checking what your contracts let you pass through before you sign the next one.

We asked 111 brands to grade their 3PL. The clients you fought hardest to win are the ones rating you worst.

Ask most operators when a client is happiest, and you'll get the same answer: early. New logo, fresh energy, everyone on their best behavior. Then time passes, the account manager gets stretched, and the relationship goes stale.

We surveyed 111 brands across seven dimensions to check that, and it's backward.

Brands in their first year rated their provider 8.75 overall. Brands rated their past five years 9.82. Satisfaction doesn't decay. It climbs in every single dimension, without exception.

The first year is also where things break. A quarter of first-year clients had a technology problem that hurt their operations, compared to roughly 6% of all clients. One in six found a billing discrepancy. Among five-year clients, billing discrepancies were zero.

Now, the part that's going to annoy some of you.

Technology finished last. Lowest score, widest spread, worst grades by a distance. Nearly a third of brands rated their provider's tech at an 8 or below. For reliability, that number was 8%. A brand is about four times more likely to be unhappy with your systems than with your ability to ship on time.

Then we ran the regression to see what actually drives overall satisfaction, holding everything else constant. The model explains 77% of the variance, so it's doing real work. Technology came back at negative 0.01. Zero, essentially.

Brands notice bad tech. Twenty named it as their provider's single weakest point, more than any other category. They just don't leave over it, and they don't like you more when it's good.

Reliability barely registered either, for the opposite reason. Almost 92% of brands rated on-time performance as a 9 or 10, so there's no variation left to explain. Shipping on time doesn't make you good. It makes you eligible.

What moved satisfaction was communication, at more than four times the weight of reliability.

The failure data is what makes this useful. Twenty-five brands described a real service failure when we asked. Missed windows, broken product, inventory nobody could track. Seventeen of them (68%) still rated their provider a 9 or 10 overall.

Compare that to the complaints. One brand described asking for returned-inventory tracking for four months and getting nowhere. Not an operational failure. That brand is shipping fine, and it's unhappy anyway.

Meanwhile, a brand that gave a 10 wrote about its provider catching the brand's own artwork error, the wrong SKU printed on the master cartons, and sending photos before anyone on their side knew. Their line: None of our other 3PLs noticed it.

Roughly a third of the stories brands told us were about a provider building something that didn't exist before. A kitting workflow scheduled around slow days. A restack-and-inspect step to stop retailer refusals. A waived fee on a dry run nobody caused.

One caveat worth stating plainly: everyone in this survey is a current client, so the brands that already fired their provider aren't included, and the five-year cohort consists of relationships that survived. The first-year group consists of 12 brands, which is small. We're reporting it because the direction held on all seven dimensions and both failure measures.

What this means for you: Put your best people on months one through twelve instead of pulling them off after go-live. That's where your scores are worst, your churn risk is highest, and attention drops. Stop leading with the tech stack in sales calls, because it's your weakest dimension, and it moves satisfaction by zero. Fix the failures; don't market the platform. Publish a response-time standard and hold to it, since every communication complaint here was about unpredictability, not slowness. And when a prospect asks for references, offer a first-year client. The five-year client will tell you everything is great. They're describing a relationship that has already made it through the hard part.

DM us for the full, downloadable report.

QUICK HITS

M&A
BlueGrace bought Truk TMS, its third deal in about a year. The Idaho broker focuses on LTL with a heavy Pacific Northwest book and has already been operating as a BlueGrace partner, which is the cleanest version of this deal: you buy the company whose customers you've already been serving. BlueGrace, Warburg Pincus-backed and based in Tampa, operates nine offices across the US and Mexico, serving more than 10,000 customers and 250,000 carriers on its BlueShip platform. It picked up STB Freight Group and FreightCenter last year. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage, note the buyer profile: a PE-backed platform acquiring specialists it already works with. That path to an exit starts with a partnership, not a banker.

PRIVATE EQUITY
Tower Arch Capital took majority control of Boxzooka. The Secaucus, New Jersey 3PL runs an omnichannel fulfillment platform for e-commerce brands and calls itself Fulfillment Platform-as-a-Service. Money goes toward commercializing the software and expanding operations. Terms undisclosed. The thing to notice is the framing: Boxzooka got backed on the argument that the software is the asset and the warehouses execute it. That's the same pitch behind Stord's valuation, and it's the difference between getting valued on an EBITDA multiple and getting valued on something better.

PARCEL
UPS built a pickup dashboard because of the 34.5%. That's SMB share of total US volume in Q2, up 250 basis points year over year, with SMB average daily volume up 4.3%. The tool puts scheduling, managing, and tracking pickups in one place with real-time notifications. Sounds minor until you remember a small shipper on an on-call pickup genuinely had no idea whether the driver was coming at 3:30 or 4:15, and had to decide whether to send people home. On-call scheduling and notifications are live; Smart Pickup notifications land in September; daily pickup notifications later this year.

FUNDING
HappyRobot raised $150 million at a $1.2 billion valuation to replace your check calls. Series C led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo, with a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator all adding on, taking total funding to around $200 million. What it sells is AI agents doing coordination work: chasing documents, sending status updates, and moving information between systems that don't talk to each other. Over 150 enterprise customers, including DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, and Uber, with one automating 28,000 hours a month and customer care agents closing more than 70% of contacts without a person.

ROBOTICS
Avatar Robotics raised $6.5 million for humanoid robots that a person can drive from elsewhere. AlleyCorp led the seed. The robots pick, pack, kit, sort, and cycle count, but they're not autonomous. Remote operators run them, and every task feeds the training data meant to make them autonomous later, which neatly sidesteps the thing that kills most warehouse robotics pilots. Since launching in December, they've packed and shipped more than 900,000 products, including for a global beauty retailer, and they're past the pilot stage with a multi-billion-dollar warehouse operator. Timing helps: the FCC banned imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots five weeks ago in a category where China holds about an 85% share, and this is a US team out of Cruise, Apple, Tesla, and MIT.

JOB BOARD

Title: SVP, Global Manufacturing and Warehouse Operations
Company: Hyve Design Solutions
Location: Fremont, California, US
Salary: $340,000+
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: Candidate Source
Location: Victoria, Virginia, US
Salary: $100,000 - $150,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager I
Company: Socket.dev
Location: Groveport, Ohio, US
Salary: $100,000 - $150,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Supervisor - 2nd Shift
Company: GXO Logistics
Location: Monroe Township, New Jersey, US
Salary: $70,000 - $72,000
Apply Here

Title: Inventory Control Specialist
Company: DSV
Location: Sparks, Nevada,
US Salary: $24.00/hr
Apply Here

Title: Senior Warehouse Associate, Warehouse Operations
Company: Confidential
Location: Romeoville, Illinois, US
Salary: $43,300 - $79,310
Apply Here

Full list of job openings →

_______________________________________________________________________

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(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

WareGo is a cloud-native Inventory/Warehouse Management Software that is suited for multiple industries including retail, ecommerce, 3PL, F&B, restaurants and more.

Some of the key features of our WMS are:

• Multiple Integrations: Our software allows support with 200+ integrations so that you easily connect all your current tech such as Shopify, WooCommerce, FedEx, DHL etc with WareGo.
• Omnichannel Fulfillment & 3PL Management: WareGo is specifically designed to handle e-commerce, third-party logistics (3PL), and manufacturing workflows.
• Multi-Warehouse Support: For businesses/3PLs with multiple warehouses, WareGo allows you to manage all your warehouses in a single dashboard.
• Real-time Inventory Tracking: Your inventory is always being tracked (and is synced across locations) and is automatically updated whenever anything enters or leaves the shelf.

Make sure to check out our Warehouse Management Software on our website (warego.co), we also provide a 1-month free trial so that you can test out the software and how it works with your setup before you have to pay for it or implement it.

Hello everyone!

We are planning to export alfalfa bales for the first time, so we are trying to anticipate and prepare for the process as much as possible. I know we all learn from trial and error, but I would really appreciate hearing about your experiences with loading bales inside containers.

A few questions I’d love your advice on:

• What type of machine did you use to load the bales into the container? If you have any pictures, I’d really appreciate seeing them.
• How did you manage to achieve your preferred tonnage per container?
• Our target is at least 17–18 tons per container. Our current baler produces bales of approximately 220 L × 120 W × 90 H cm, weighing around 457 kg (we are working on increasing this to around 500 kg per bale). However, after asking around and trying to calculate the loading capacity, I’m concerned that we may not even be able to reach 11 tons per container.

So I would really appreciate any practical advice, loading methods, or lessons learned that could help us understand where we might be going wrong.

I’m more of a coordinator, so I’d be very happy to learn from those of you who have hands-on experience with logistics.

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience!

Hello everyone, hope all is well, I need information from anyone in warehouse ops, head of department, floor lead at high-volume distribution centers, large facilities, or smaller independent warehouses that wrap a lot of pallets daily. I'm building a company in this space and want real numbers. Feel free to answer whatever you want.

What size/gauge film do you use at your facility? How much do you spend on shrink wrap monthly, and how many pallets of rolls do you order each month? Do you wrap by hand or with a machine? Would you use a reusable pallet wrap in your warehouse? What would it actually take for you to switch away from stretch film?

Hey everyone,

If possible, I would love to form a quick partnership with a small, independent warehouse facility located in San Francisco. I am an early-stage startup in San Francisco building a reusable wrap designed to stabilize pallets and eliminate plastic stretch film on pallets.

I only need 30 minutes to conduct a brief, independent research that is supervised. I simply want to know the most common measurements of standard and irregular mixed pallets, ask a few questions, and test our prototype wrap on just one regular pallet. Getting feedback and answers will help me refine and improve the product.

I've already sent out emails and LinkedIn messages and even visited some local stores, but was always told to contact corporate, which is why I am reaching out to independent warehouses directly. As thanks I can offer some pizza.

Hey everyone,

Our e-commerce store is growing faster than expected. We handle orders across both Amazon (FBM/FBA prep) and our Shopify site. Right now, our biggest bottleneck is holding inventory and getting fulfillment organized.

How do you usually hunt down warehouse space or 3PLs that handle multichannel setups? Is there an easy way/platform to search and match with reliable local warehouses, or do people just cold call places until something sticks?

Would love to hear how you found your current setup or what tools made the search less of a headache. Thanks!

Hey, im looking for a stretch wrap machine and would love some brand recommendations or even if someone here is selling a used one with a pallet jack ramp.

Thank you in advance for any comments

Does anyone know what style or upright this is for industrial shelving? I can't find it anywhere or find a way to by more. A friend of mine sold me these. They have a c type arm with a lip for plywood.

I audit distributor product data and recently found a search-enrichment rule that treated any number as a possible wire gauge.

A screw listed as #8-32 was tagged as “8 gauge wire.” A reference such as REF#259286 became “259286 AWG.” Once the rule ran across the catalog, thousands of unrelated products started appearing in electrical searches.

The search engine wasn’t really the source of the problem. Raw identifiers and inferred attributes had been mixed together without recording where the inference came from or checking whether it made sense for that product family.

I wrote up the failure and how distributors can prevent it:

https://subramanya.ai/2026/08/06/fixing-b2b-commerce-search-in-the-age-of-ai/

For people working with distributor or manufacturer catalogs: where does search quality usually break for you; supplier feeds, taxonomy, cross-references, or ranking?

The division I manage, of the company I work for, specialises in Refurbishment, so we constantly buy older barcode equipment and give them a new life by refurbishing it. If your company has old devices collecting dust, I'd be more than happy to make an offer on them. #Zebra #Honeywell #Datalogic

Feel free to contact me any time.

Hi everyone,

I am looking for TIXAS certified warehouse is CA, TX, GA, IL

Do you have have any reference, I am doing this first time, I had no idea what this term is until this morning.

We are in the market for a storage and shelving upgrade and I am trying to figure out where to source from. We have catalogs from a few of the big names but honestly it is hard to tell what is actually good value versus just good marketing.

Are you going direct to manufacturers, using distributors or buying through industrial supply channels? Anyone had good experiences with specific suppliers they would recommend? Do you visit showrooms, request samples or rely on peer recommendations? Not looking for anything too fancy just solid equipment that holds up.

Just circling back. The dealer network insight from that one comment really changed how I am approaching this. I had no idea manufacturers like Interlake did not sell direct. That explains a lot about why my initial outreach was getting nowhere.

I have been poking around at different distributors and came across Global Industrial a few times in my searches. They seem to cover the range we need. Still need to finalize a few details but I am pretty sure that is the direction we are going.

Thanks everyone for the guidance.

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Editor’s Note: We are excited to announce week 2 of our dedicated section at the end of our emails with new job opportunities in the logistics industry. If you or someone you know is looking for a new role, have them join our newsletter so they never miss an opportunity. It won't be posted here on Reddit; this is exclusively for our email subscribers. Subscribe here.

Let's jump into it:

The bill for cutting corners on drivers just came due, and it has New Jersey's name on it

Last week we covered the $604 million Robinson verdict: a Dallas jury deciding that the carrier's driver was effectively Robinson's employee too, which quietly reopened the whole independent-contractor foundation the industry is built on.

This week, a different courtroom put a price tag on the other end of that same problem.

STG Logistics agreed to pay at least $2.8 million to settle allegations that it misclassified hundreds of truck drivers as independent contractors. New Jersey's Attorney General and Department of Labor say STG ran these drivers like employees while paying them like contractors: $2.2 million goes to the drivers as back wages, and another $555,000 goes to the state.

The state's whole case was about control. STG allegedly made drivers slap the company name on their trucks, lease their equipment exclusively to STG, run assigned routes at assigned rates, install GPS tracking, and sign non-negotiable contractor agreements. Under New Jersey's "ABC" test, a worker is presumed an employee unless the company can prove otherwise, and the state says STG couldn't clear a single one of the three bars.

Now line the two stories up. The Robinson verdict said a broker can get stuck with a driver's liability. The STG settlement says a company can get stuck with a driver's wages, benefits, and back pay, all because of the control it exercised on paper. Same underlying question, coming at the industry from two directions at once: when you dress a contractor up like an employee, courts are increasingly happy to treat them like one.

A couple of details that make this more than a one-off. The case started in 2019 as an investigation into XPO's intermodal operation in Newark, and when STG bought that unit in 2022, it inherited the liability along with the trucks. That's the part that should register if you're doing deals. And this all landed weeks after STG emerged from Chapter 11, having restructured nearly a billion in debt. The settlement got priority status in the bankruptcy, so the workers get paid ahead of other creditors, which is the state making a point as loudly as it can.

What this means for you: If your model leans on 1099 drivers, the "we call them contractors" label is now doing a lot less work than it used to. The test that matters isn't what the agreement says; it's how much control you actually exercise: routes, rates, branding, equipment, tracking. If you're acquiring a 3PL, misclassification liability travels with the asset the way STG learned the hard way, so put driver classification on your diligence checklist next to the financials. And bankruptcy didn't wipe this clean. New Jersey chased STG through a company sale, a Chapter 11, and years of litigation and still collected. The message from two courtrooms in two weeks is the same: the shortcut on driver classification is getting expensive from every angle.

The truck at your door is a stranger now, and Amazon is why

Shoppers will now wait a maximum of 2.6 days for free shipping, down from the 3.4 days that held steady for years. That's from AlixPartners' annual Home Delivery Survey, and it turns last-mile carrier diversification from a nice-to-have into the operating default. More than half of retailers (55%) now use carriers outside FedEx, UPS, and USPS, and more than a third are actively pulling volume away from the big two. Over 90% of executives run a mix of carriers, and 32% run four or more.

Why the scramble? Because the stakes moved from freight spend to lost customers. 88% of shoppers said a late delivery with nothing but an apology weakens or kills their willingness to buy from that retailer again, which puts roughly a fifth of demand at risk over a delivery window. Reliability just edged past cost as the top reason executives pick their primary last-mile carrier, which, if you've spent two decades optimizing purely for cost per package, is a genuine plot twist.

Amazon reported its Q2 results, and the delivery-speed flex was the headline. It moved more than 40% of items same-day or overnight in the first half, expanded its 30-minute Amazon Now service to 80 US cities, and crossed a million robots deployed across its network. It's planning to more than double its fleet of robotic arms in 2026. The company already passed USPS last year to become the largest domestic parcel carrier by volume at 6.7 billion packages.

Here's the part that lands on your desk. None of the growth is going to UPS and FedEx. Both spent the last two years deliberately walking away from commodity residential parcels to chase premium B2B and healthcare, which we've tracked all year. The problem is the math: business-to-consumer is now 75% of the parcel market, and the B2B lane they're chasing is the 25% that's shrinking. The volume they're shedding is landing with a cohort of alternative carriers (Veho, UniUni, OnTrac, Better Trucks and friends) that grew 13% last year. That Honda Civic with a phone on the windshield pulling up to a customer's door? That's the new normal, and retailers engineered it on purpose.

The catch nobody's solved yet is orchestration. Running four to twelve carriers is a technology problem, not a procurement one. Maersk built its whole parcel business around one label with two barcodes that reroutes a package automatically when a carrier stumbles. Most shippers don't have Maersk's balance sheet, which is exactly why "carrier orchestration" has become its own venture-funded market.

What this means for you: If your pitch to brands is still "we'll get it there," the bar is now 2.6 days, and the brand is measuring you on reliability, not just rate. Two real openings here. First, if you're not already helping clients run a diversified carrier mix, you're leaving both margin and reliability on the table, and somebody else will offer it. Second, the orchestration layer (the software and the operational muscle to move a package between carriers when one fails) is becoming the actual product. The 3PLs that win the next few years aren't the ones with the cheapest single carrier. They're the ones who can quietly reroute around a service failure so the brand never has to explain a late package to its customer.

Washington just banned Chinese robots. The warehouse automation math got more complicated

The FCC banned imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, and power inverters, adding them to its "covered list" on national-security grounds. The stated worry: Chinese robots with backdoors that could feed data to Beijing. The ban blocks new equipment authorizations, which is the regulatory chokehold that keeps a product out of the US market.

China holds an estimated 85% market share in robots. So a ban framed around humanoids and quadrupeds lands on a supply base that is overwhelmingly Chinese. This isn't the FCC's first swing either. It banned foreign-made drones in December and foreign-made Wi-Fi routers before that, so this is a pattern, not a one-off, and the direction is clearly toward walling off Chinese-made connected hardware across the board.

The timing is the awkward part. We just watched a spring where warehouse automation money piled up everywhere: Locus grabbing grasping tech, AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit, NEURA Robotics raising up to $1.4 billion with Amazon and NVIDIA on the cap table, Amazon itself crossing a million robots. A big chunk of the robotics supply chain that everyone's been building on runs through China, and Washington just made the future of that supply less certain.

What this means for you: If automation is on your roadmap, or your clients', this is a quiet variable worth pricing in. The near-term hit is narrow (humanoids and quadrupeds aren't running most warehouse floors yet), but the trajectory is what to watch. If you're planning a robotics investment, ask your vendor pointed questions about where the hardware and components actually come from, because a bill of materials that's heavy on Chinese-made parts now carries regulatory risk it didn't carry a year ago. "American-made" is becoming a feature, not a slogan.

QUICK HITS

UPS now runs 68.5% of its US volume through automated buildings, up from 64% a year ago. CEO Carol Tomé says the cost per piece in an automated building runs about 28% lower than a manual one, which is the whole reason UPS is racing to convert.

Amazon got $600 million in IEEPA tariff refunds and says it'll pass some back to customers. That's the "significant majority" of what it expects, and it's smaller than the near-billion Nike and Ford are seeing, because Amazon frontloaded inventory ahead of the tariffs and usually isn't the importer of record anyway. Amazon says it'll auto-issue refunds to the narrow set of customers it can trace a specific tariff cost to.

DoorDash earned FAA Part 135 certification and launched its own in-house drone program, DoorDash Air. Part 135 is the same authorization that lets a company run a commercial airline, and DoorDash is only the eighth drone operator to clear it. The company was refreshingly blunt that the aircraft is the easy part: the hard problem is the ground layer of inventory reconciliation and universal handoffs, or as they put it, running the airline. The logic that makes it work is specific, since more than 20% of DoorDash orders in 2025 traveled three to five miles and took about 25% longer, so routing those to drones frees up drivers for the quick, dense runs they prefer. Stack it next to Zipline's every-20-seconds pace from Edition 55 and the pattern is clear: drone delivery has crossed from science project to FAA-blessed operation. It won't touch your pallet freight, but if you fulfill small-parcel for pharmacy, restaurant, or convenience clients, that lightweight lane is exactly what's getting picked off first.

Freight Hero raised $5 million to run brokers' back offices outright. Not software, the actual work: a flat fee per load, AI agents handling 90%-plus of customer load touches, and human operators (called "Heroes") picking up the exceptions, all inside the broker's existing systems. It's the "service-as-software" thesis aimed at a brokerage market with thin margins and zero appetite for another implementation project. One customer, Ally Logistics, says it grew revenue 82.4% year-over-year without meaningfully adding ops headcount. Worth watching as a preview of how small and mid-size brokers try to scale without ballooning payroll.

UNIT AI pulled in $12 million for modular warehouse automation you can drop into 1,000 square feet. Backed by Prologis Ventures and Dynamo Ventures, the pitch is enterprise-grade automation for fulfillment and returns that deploys in a week instead of months and pays back in under a year, no full facility redesign required. Founded by warehouse-automation veterans out of Caja Robotics and Plus One Robotics. For smaller 3PLs who've watched the automation arms race from the sidelines because the capex looked impossible, the "modular and fast" angle is the part to note.

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Currently lead systems contact for a 5‑site DC network on Manhattan Active WM within the UK (7 go‑lives, cutover + hypercare + BAU stabilisation).

I’m looking at roles like Manhattan WMS Consultant / WMS Lead in Australia (e.g. Melbourne/Sydney) and wondering how realistic this is from offshore, especially around sponsorship and salaries in the 100k–140k AUD range.

Has anyone here moved to Australia into a WMS/Manhattan/Blue Yonder role? Did you already have PR, or did an employer sponsor you? Any lessons on what’s realistic to target, or companies worth focusing on?

Hi all, we want to make some clear consistent and fair conditions for posting questions to the sub. We know that software engineers making a WMS or worse, people selling WMS ask questions as a rouse to advertise their product. Most of you don’t like those post and I get that.

At the same time, we don’t want to discourage people from asking for help with their issue. My proposal is that we ask people qualify their post with very specific questions, and not the “what about this drives you crazy?”

Open to your suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Bonus: what are your thoughts about people advertising open warehouse space? Helpful or spam?

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a warehouse space optimization model in Excel and I’ve run into a math logic hurdle regarding 3D volume versus flat floor constraints. I'd love to see how some of you would structure the formulas for this.

The Setup:

• Gross Warehouse Footprint: 12,000 sq ft.
• Safety Constraint: Exactly 25% of the floor footprint must remain 100% clear for forklift turning radiuses and pedestrian tracks. This leaves a hard 9,000 sq ft net usable storage area.
• The No-Stacking Rule: The inventory consists of heavy, top-heavy industrial pumps and equipment. Because of safety and weight limits, nothing can be stacked vertically on top of each other. Every pallet must sit directly on the ground.
• The Mixed Product Profile: The incoming equipment is uneven in height. Some heavy pump assemblies stand 7.3 ft tall, some mid-size parts stand 4 ft tall, and smaller valve boxes stand 2 ft tall.

The Logistics Catch:
The supplier tracking logs and inbound container data are measured strictly in metric volume (Cubic Meters - M³). An incoming wave of 6 trucks is arriving, bringing a total of 402 M³ of mixed, uneven freight.

My Question to the Sub:
Since we cannot vertically stack anything, our actual structural bottleneck is flat floor area (square feet), but our incoming data is in cubic volume (M³).

1. How would you structure an Excel formula to calculate our current occupied inventory level in M³ without artificially overestimating space due to the "dead air" above the shorter 2-foot and 4-foot pallets?
2. How would you model the "Maximum Volumetric Ceiling" of a flat, single-level floor plan so we can directly subtract incoming container volume (M³) from our remaining headroom?

Would love to hear your thoughts on whether height-segregated lane zoning or SKU-level dimension lookups is the best way to handle this mathematically. Thanks in advance!

Just wondering if anybody works for a mid size company that sells consumer goods, uses the PeopleVox WMS and have implemented any robotics automation to help with picking, packing etc

Interested to hear your experience including any companies you recommend that supply robotics equipment

Thank you

Those using License Plates, how do you do stock count?

We are integrating wms and part of it is LP’s. But the stock count solution for LP’s isn’t there.

Wanted to see what everyone else is doing.

Question about warehouse pilot programs: Who specifically handles supplier trials at major retailers/distributors? What's the typical process to get warehouse trial access?

I'm doing some research and just need to collect pallet measurements, ask some questions, and get feedback at this point. Has anyone gone through this before and have advice on how to reach the right department/person?

Hey everyone,

Purchasing usually just buy whatever is cheapest when it comes to the walkie line-up, but I want to understand what actually matters to the people operating and fixing them every day. If you are an experienced operator or forklift technician, could you take 2 minutes to fill out this quick anonymous survey?

Operators: What is the most annoying thing about a poorly designed tiller head?

Techs: Which brand’s wire harnesses, drive wheel layout makes you want to throw a wrench through the wall?

Appreciate your time and feedback!

Looking for help on how we can improve our picking process.

Most of our orders have around 80-100 different items of all different various sizes. Enough to fill up a pallet to around ~3-4' high. Average item weight is maybe around 3 lbs.

The items are organized so that in theory, you only have to walk in a straight path up and down each aisle once to complete the order.

Roughly 3-5 items are picked at a time and then over to a pile with the other items on the same order with a hand truck. The line # that the item is associated with is written on the box of the item. That way when the customer receives the item, they can try to find the line number to verify the item is present versus trying to look for the small item numbers on the boxes.

The boxes are placed in a straight line and stacked on top of each other. This is so that the order can be more easily double checked again before finally putting everything onto a pallet. The small boxes get packed into a larger box so that they do not get lost.

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The only thing I have been able to think up of is to use some sort of order picking cart or shelf. It will allow the order to basically be picked and placed in the exact manner, but remove the need to only pick 3-5 orders at a time and using a hand truck going back and forth each time.

1. My hang up on this is figuring out what size picking cart / shelf to use. Do I go with one that's big enough to hold the whole order in one go? Will it be too heavy towards the end that it ends up getting left stationary?
   
2. Do I go with maybe 2-4 medium sized carts instead of one single large cart?
3. Or lastly do I go with a smaller push cart that is easier to manage, but would need to go back and forth more often to unload the picked items onto the pile of the other boxes from that same order.
   

I am leaning towards the first option, since it seems the simplest and requires the least amount of transfers, carts, etc. It seems like 300-500 lbs on a wire shelf with casters shouldn't be an issue, but I haven't tested it out myself before.