I've recently moved into a 3pl for warehousing and fulfillment. I have about 250 skus and about 3000+ items warehoused.
I'm relatively new to this but have picked and packed my businesses orders for over ten years myself.
Recently we've experienced about 4 mispicks and 13 orders that have sat for over 7+ days unfulfilled in a week of about 250 orders.
Is this normal? What percentage of mispicks are acceptable? Thank you.
We’re a Brisbane software company developing a tool to reduce the paperwork involved in unloading containers.
It uses warehouse cameras to record:
After unloading, it automatically creates a job report with the important times and photos.
How do you record this information now? Would an automatic report save your team time? What else should it include?
We have an early working demo and would appreciate honest feedback from warehouse managers.
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. We're currently on week 59!
Let's jump into it,
Daily auctions for August transit slots through the Panama Canal's Panamax locks have averaged about $1.1 million, more than sixteen times what the same slots went for a year ago. Auctions for the larger Neopanamax locks are averaging around $2.5 million, the highest on record, with individual slots since late July hitting $3.78 million.
Two things are squeezing at once, and they're unrelated.
The first is water. The canal runs its locks on fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is currently below its long-run average, and Argus expects it to keep dropping. A strengthening El Niño tends to bring drought to Central America, and the Panama Canal Authority has already imposed three draft restrictions on the Panamax locks in the past month, with the permitted draft scheduled to fall to 47.5 feet by September 3, down from the usual 50. Fewer drafts mean less cargo per vessel and a longer queue behind it. On August 3, 113 ships were waiting for a transit slot. On January 2, there were 40.
The second is oil. The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since the U.S. and Israel-led bombardment of Iran began on February 28. That waterway normally carries about a fifth of global oil flows, so Asian buyers have been sourcing crude and refined products from the U.S. Gulf Coast instead, and the shortest way from the Gulf Coast to Asia runs through Panama. Energy cargo is now competing for the same slots as everything else.
Most large carriers book transit slots well in advance at fixed rates that bear no resemblance to these numbers, and only up to 30% of canal traffic goes through the daily auction. The Panama Canal Authority has characterized the million-dollar payments as temporary market fluctuations rather than a general fee increase. So the auction figure isn't a bill anyone's container is paying. It's a read on how badly some operators need to move right now, and it's the same signal that preceded the 2023 restrictions.
What this means for you: If you have clients importing to East Coast or Gulf ports on all-water services, this is the week to ask their forwarders about canal surcharges and transit buffers rather than the week the surcharge shows up. Draft restrictions cut container capacity per sailing, and that shortfall gets recovered somewhere on the invoice. The thing to watch is which pressure eases first, because a drought story resolves when it rains and an oil-routing story doesn't. If your inventory planning assumes normal all-water transit times into the fall, build in slack now and be honest with brands about it before they commit to a promo calendar.
FulfillYN is an independent 3PL matchmaking consultancy. We pair growing retail and e-commerce brands with fulfillment partners who actually fit, from a vetted network of 439 warehouses. We know which providers are built for your world and which will figure it out on your dime.
If you don’t want to waste 3 months sitting through sales calls, filling out forms, negotiating, this is the service for you.
Tell us what you ship, and we'll put you in front of 2-3 that genuinely fit.
Verisk CargoNet logged 677 supply chain theft incidents in Q2, down 26% from a year ago and 14% from Q1. Estimated losses over the same period went from $135.7 million to $304.6 million.
The average theft with a reported commodity value came in at $564,009, though CargoNet is upfront that a handful of extreme losses dragged that figure around. The plain reading is that much of the low-effort volume theft has dried up, while a smaller group has gotten much better at picking targets. Keith Lewis, who runs operations at CargoNet, put it as groups that aren't trying to steal more freight, just trying to identify the right shipment.
What they're picking is specific. Metal theft rose from 54 to 80 incidents, with copper still the favorite and aluminum, nickel, and tungsten climbing. Enterprise computer and networking equipment stayed a priority, along with crypto mining hardware, and CargoNet makes the point that matters for anyone touching this freight: these loads can be worth millions, and they move through the network as ordinary dry goods, with paperwork and a security profile that don't reflect what's inside. Meanwhile, beverage and grocery theft fell off sharply, auto parts and tires dropped, and seafood went up by eleven events, which is its own strange little trend.
The decline came mostly from two things going away. Fewer criminals are buying up legitimate motor carriers to book freight under a clean operating authority and then disappear with it, and there was less organized theft of unattended loaded trailers, especially in California, Texas, South Florida, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Straight theft events dropped from 488 to 378. Fictitious pickups barely moved, 165 down to 158.
Business email compromise is still the front door. One set of credentials gives someone shipment data, contact directories, and access to a TMS, enough to identify a valuable load, impersonate a party everyone already trusts, and reroute it while it looks completely normal to the broker, the carrier, and the receiver. If that sounds familiar, it's the same mechanic behind the Ceva intrusion we covered two weeks ago.
Now put Landstar next to that. On its July earnings call, VP and chief safety and operations officer Matt Miller disclosed that the company has cut its approved carrier pool from more than 100,000 in mid-2022 to roughly 64,600 today. That's a 35% reduction, over 35,000 carriers removed, and it dropped another 7% year-over-year in Q2 after a 19% cut in Q1. Overdrive reported that the effort began in response to cargo theft and freight fraud, with identity checks and tighter compliance measures layered on.
It ends up somewhere else. The Supreme Court's May decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II broadened broker liability for carrier selection, and CFO Jim Todd said plainly that cases that used to be dismissed on federal preemption grounds must now be litigated. Landstar took $10.5 million in unfavorable prior-year claims adjustments in Q2, with three of the five responsible claims coming out of brokerage. CEO Frank Lonegro is asking federal regulators for clearer vetting standards, which is what a company says when it has spent four years building a process and would like everyone else held to the same one.
The market seems to be pricing it as an advantage. Landstar's insurance renewal on June 1 came in with auto liability flat and broker liability up about 3%, which is a soft outcome for a post-Montgomery renewal. Agent inquiries have picked up since the ruling landed, including an $18 million Midwest brokerage that signed on as an independent agent. And this is all happening in a tightening truckload market, with Lonegro describing capacity as having tightened significantly and conditions moving in favor of the provider for the first time since late 2022. Landstar's truck revenue rose 19% to $1.33 billion on 2% load growth, so essentially all of it came from rates.
What this means for you: If you broker, understand what the Landstar number implies: tens of thousands of carriers got dropped by one of the most established networks in the country, and they are calling somebody, and that somebody has a real chance of being you. On the theft side, the exposure isn't the yard; it's the inbox. BEC is now the access point for most sophisticated schemes, making carrier fraud an IT problem your ops team inherits. And if you handle metals, enterprise hardware, or anything with a fast resale market, the freight needs a security profile that matches its value rather than its BOL.
The Association for Advancing Automation put out its Q2 numbers, and the interesting part isn't the unit count.
North American companies ordered 8,940 robots in the second quarter, worth $622 million. Units were up 4.3% from a year ago. Order value was up 21.3%. Run that out, and the average robot ordered this quarter cost around $70,000, up from roughly $60,000 a year earlier. Buyers aren't adding volume so much as buying up the stack, integrating into bigger systems rather than adding another arm to the line.
The first half totaled 17,995 units and $1.166 billion, a 2% increase in units and 6.6% in value. Underneath that flat-looking topline, the customer base is shifting hard. Automotive OEM orders fell 25% in the first half, which historically would have dragged the whole market down. It didn't, because semiconductors and electronics ordered 35% more units, life sciences and pharma 32%, automotive components 24%, and food and consumer goods 17%. Non-automotive buyers were 56% of Q2 units. A3's Alex Shikany framed it as the market mix continuing to evolve, which is the polite version of saying Detroit stopped being the whole story.
Two caveats before you take that to a client meeting. A3 counts industrial robot orders across all of manufacturing, so this isn't a warehouse automation number, even though it’s reported as one. And these are orders, not installations, so they reflect decisions made a couple of quarters ago.
The piece that does translate is collaborative robots. Companies ordered 2,774 cobots in the first half, totaling $114 million, which accounts for 15.4% of all units but less than 10% of the dollars. That gap is the whole point. Cobots are the cheap, fast, low-infrastructure end of the market, and adoption is concentrated where the work is fiddly and high-mix: they were 43.7% of life sciences orders and 36.5% of semiconductor and electronics orders.
For context on the demand side, companies bought more than 36,700 robots last year, the most since 2022, and Interact Analysis found that 92% of surveyed companies plan to increase automation spending this year. GXO has invested close to a billion dollars in automating its buildings over the past five years. Amazon signed a warehouse automation supply agreement with AutoStore on undisclosed terms, which is notable mainly because Amazon builds most of its own robotics, and going outside for cube storage suggests it isn't trying to build everything twice.
What this means for you: The per-unit price is moving against you, so any automation quote you're sitting on has a shorter shelf life than you'd think, and a proposal you priced six months ago probably isn't the proposal you get today. If capex has been the reason you keep passing, cobots are the honest entry point rather than a compromise, and the industries adopting them fastest are the ones with messy, variable, high-mix work, which describes most multi-client fulfillment floors. And with 92% of companies planning to spend more, expect the automation question to move from a nice differentiator to a table-stakes item in RFPs.
U.S. retail sales came in at $763.6 billion in July, down 0.6% from June, according to Commerce Department data, after June managed a 0.2% gain. The pullback is consistent with what warehouse operators have been describing all summer: retailers pulled inventory forward into May and June ahead of tariff deadlines and then went quiet. One soft month isn't a trend, but if your Q4 volume forecasts were built on spring order patterns, this is a reason to check them against what your clients are actually receiving right now.
Teamsters California sued the state DMV on August 5 to block heavy-duty autonomous truck permits. The 34-page complaint in Alameda County Superior Court asks the court to set aside the regulations the DMV adopted on April 28, which removed the ban on autonomous vehicles rated over 10,001 pounds. The legal argument is procedural rather than philosophical: the union says the DMV skipped a Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment that state law requires for any rule with more than $50 million in first-year economic impact, and that it puts more than 200,000 California semi-truck driving jobs at risk. Peter Finn of Teamsters California framed the safety case around trucks up to sixteen times heavier than a robotaxi at highway speeds. The stakes are high because California matters to developers, as the state handles 40% of the nation's containerized imports and 30% of exports.
Fura acquired High Rise Logistics, its seventh deal. The Cincinnati broker is running a straightforward roll-up thesis: buy established books, move them onto a shared AI platform for bidding, carrier sales, and visibility, and skip the overhead stacking that usually kills these strategies. High Rise, out of Vancouver, Washington, brings flatbed, expedited, truckload, and LTL along with intermodal, drayage, and warehousing, plus a real Pacific Northwest footprint. Leadership stays on to run daily operations. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage or an asset-light 3PL, this is the second consecutive week with the same buyer profile, and the pattern is consistent: they want your customers and your team, and they're bringing the technology.
Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
Apply Here
Title: General Manager - Fulfillment
Company: iDrive Fulfillment
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, US
Salary: $90,000 - $120,000
Apply Here
Title: Refrigerated Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: The Judge Group
Location: Dallas, Texas, US
Salary: $90,000 - $115,000
Apply Here
Title: Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fringe Sport
Location: Austin, Texas, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here
Title: Warehouse Manager
Company: RYSE Up Sports Nutrition
Location: Prosper, Texas, US
Salary: $75K-85K
Apply Now
Title: Senior Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: HR Annie Consulting
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Salary: $70,000 - $80,000
Apply Here
Title: Assistant Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fulco Fulfillment
Location: Dover, New Jersey, US
Salary: $55,000 - $70,000
Apply Here
_______________________________________________________________________
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(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)
Looking for reliable 3PL/warehouse partners that drop off directly at a GoFo hub every day. GoFo pickup from the warehouse is a bonus, but direct hub drop-off is a must.
I work with agencies, so order volume will be high and consistent. Need a 3PL that can handle large volumes with zero delays — orders must be processed and handed off on time, every time.
If you’re a 3PL that fits, DM me with your warehouse locations, GoFo hub(s) you use, capacity, and pricing.
Looking for a reliable long-term partnership with plenty of volume.
Most morning dispatch bottlenecks aren't actually caused by a shortage of drivers or vehicles. They’re usually caused by invisible route overloads.
When orders are assigned strictly based on customer deadlines without a quick check on vehicle and driver capacity limits, heavy routes get stacked way beyond capacity while reserve fleet vans sit half-empty. Then morning shift hits: drivers are stuck at the dock, cargo gets reshuffled on the fly, and deliveries go out late.
A recently published case study breaks down how a regional courier fleet can systematically fix this using a simple workload capacity planner framework. The core approach relies on calculating backlog hours relative to vehicle limits to spot route overloads a few days early—allowing dispatchers to level-load cargo before loading ever starts.
Core takeaways from the walkthrough:
- Eliminates last-minute loading dock reshuffling
- Drastically shortens daily dispatch planning huddles
- Gives full fleet visibility using standard spreadsheet logic instead of expensive enterprise software.
How do your operations currently track route capacity limits during busy dispatch weeks?
Our warehouse layout is pretty tight with narrow aisles, limited turning space, and not much room to redesign things. Before even thinking about automation, we’re trying to understand if AMRs can realistically work in this kind of setup or if they only work well in big open warehouses.
For me, it's keeping supplier data up to date.
It feels like every time a supplier changes an image, a specification or even a product title, someone has to manually check and update everything.
I'm currently looking for ways to reduce that manual work, but I'm curious...
What's the biggest product data challenge your team is dealing with?
Have you found a solution, or is it just something you've accepted as part of the job?
Need help learning it, any advice on where/how to start?
We're trying to decide whether to keep repairing some of our older warehouse equipment or just replace it all at once. Most of it still works, but the wheels are worn out, a couple of carts don't roll straight anymore, and we're wasting time dealing with little issues every week.
For anyone who's gone through this, did replacing your handling equipment make much difference to day-to-day operations, or did you just end up spending money without noticing a huge improvement?
EDIT:Appreciate all the advice. We decided to replace the worst of it instead of continuing to patch everything up. Ended up ordering the new roll cages and picking trolleys from Rollcage.ie Ireland, and the difference has honestly been noticeable already.
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,
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.
Turn Brands’ Excess Inventory Into a Revenue Opportunity
The fastest-growing 3PLs aren’t just moving inventory; they are helping brands solve inventory problems.
Stock is a platform that makes donating excess inventory as easy as fulfilling an e-commerce order.
Stock gives warehouses and 3PLs a turnkey solution to help clients move excess, aging, returned, and slow-moving inventory while freeing up valuable warehouse space. Offered as a white-labeled value-added service, Stock creates a new revenue stream for your operation and delivers measurable value to the brands you serve
Instead of holding unsold inventory, we help brands ship it directly to nonprofits in need. Meanwhile, you reclaim pallet positions, improve utilization, and strengthen customer retention by offering a service competitors don't.
As inventory volatility and returns continue to rise, the ability to help brands move excess inventory is becoming a competitive advantage.
Free space. Recover value. Create a new revenue stream.
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.
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.
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.
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
_______________________________________________________________________
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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 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.
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?
I’m looking into robotic warehouse automation for a high-volume operation. Which processes are usually the best starting points for automation?
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
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?
I've been working through the 2024 storage surcharges, low-inventory fees, hazmat, and oversize rules trying to nail down actual per-SKU margin — not just raw fees, but a real keep-or-pass call.
Want to sanity check my math against real numbers. If anyone's willing to share a SKU from a recent manifest (cost, category, rough qty), I'll run the numbers and post exactly how I get to keep/pass, so you can tell me if it matches what you'd calculate by hand.
Not selling anything — just want to know if my math is actually right before I trust it myself.
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.