“Automation no longer has to be a fear monger”

Thomas Wimmer knows many examples of how companies automate their logistics and warehousing. Every year, the Bundesvereinigung Logistik (BVL) in Bremen, of which Wimmer is chairman, awards outstanding projects with the German Logistics Prize. Winners of the past few years have been companies as diverse as the drugstore chain DM, the car manufacturer BMW and the Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Cargo.

"DM - winner of the German Logistics Prize 2020 - has set up a highly automated distribution center in Wustermark, Brandenburg," says Wimmer. "This means that every DM branch with its different article structure can be supplied individually." BMW, winner of the year 2019, has reorganized and heavily automated its factory logistics with the "Logistics Next" project.

Around 70,000 truck drivers are currently missing in Germany. On the other hand, companies, associations and labor market experts cannot precisely quantify the shortage in warehouse logistics. This is mainly due to the fact that all activities in warehousing where this makes sense are continuously being automated. "Companies have been using technology and automation in their warehousing very selectively for years," says Wimmer. To operate trucks, on the other hand, drivers will probably have to sit directly at the steering wheel for a long time to come - which is becoming more and more of a problem because the baby boomers are also retiring here.

The physically hard work in the logistics warehouse has always been considered rather unattractive. “Companies are constantly looking for scope to automate repetitive warehousing activities,” says Wimmer. "One motive is also to upgrade the work profile of warehouse and logistics activities, be it out of pure appreciation for the employees, be it to be competitive when recruiting new employees."

The requirements have also changed due to the constantly growing online trade and its rhythm: "After a weekend with many online orders, the orders in the logistics warehouses are backed up massively and have to be processed. You can't do that if you don't use more and more modern technology."

According to the Federal Employment Agency, around 40,300 of the around 1.04 million employees in Hamburg who were subject to social insurance contributions at the time were working in warehouse logistics in June 2022. The proportion of employees in the warehousing professions had even increased slightly in recent years with the boom in logistics.

In view of the demographic change, however, the logistics industry is well advised to use automation in a targeted manner, says Sönke Fock, head of the Hamburg Employment Agency: "The automation of processes in industry and logistics no longer has to be the fearmonger it used to be , when automation was seen by society as a 'job killer'.” However, one cannot pretend that “automation has no influence on the type of work: the jobs that are created are different from those that are lost. When in doubt, the newly created jobs require employees to have higher qualifications.”

From Fock's point of view, the structural change towards more automation is also inevitable in the logistics industry: "Hamburg and the metropolitan region have a state-of-the-art logistics industry that is technologically one of the international leaders and has been driving structural change for a long time," he says. "More automation and digitization in the local logistics industry always means, when in doubt, to remain competitive at all."