Beyer, Ingram Micro executive, calls for new approach to logistics warehouse design in interview with Prologis COO Anderson (with video)

However, urban infill space — raw land set for repurposing — is not easy to find and is not cheap. Existing urban buildings that might be candidates for warehouse modification often lack the infrastructure and building design to effectively support e-commerce fulfillment and distribution services. Experts have said that many facilities are designed and built to support traditional retail replenishment, not e-commerce.

Owned by Chinese giant HNA Technology, Ingram Micro is a $50 billion company with 198 logistics and service centers in 164 countries. It is the world’s largest distributor of information technology products and handles one out of every three cellphones in the U.S. market. However, it today distributes more non-IT goods than IT products, according to Beyer. Ingram Micro has been involved in dedicated e-commerce fulfillment for about seven years. That coincided with its 2013 acquisition of CloudBlue, a global reverse logistics and enterprise IT asset disposition services provider that Beyer co-founded and headed.

Despite its sophistication and deep pockets, Ingram Micro would benefit just like smaller companies from a “plug-and-play” environment that dramatically compresses the operational ramp-up cycle that today could run 90 days or more, Beyer said. Occupying a property with an already-installed basic infrastructure would eliminate the “huge sunk cost” that Ingram Micro incurs from when it signs a contract to when it begins generating revenue, he added.

Prologis, for its part, has a “smart warehouse” project underway that marries robotics and warehouse management systems (WMS) to create the type heavily automated warehouse model that Beyer spoke of during the keynote.  Prologis has also launched a workforce initiative in which it works with communities to recruit and train people for logistics positions. Prologis wants to train 25,000 workers by 2025, Anderson said. 

Labor availability in general is a huge pain point, Beyer said. Ingram Micro’s year-round full-time warehouse workforce of about 15,000 swells to nearly double that for the holiday shipping season. However, the company is struggling to meet current staffing demand, especially as government stimulus plans resulting from the coronavirus pandemic have made it more attractive for a number of unemployed Americans to stay home rather than return to work, Beyer said.