Supply chains across the world are under extraordinary pressure. Regulations, geopolitical instability, changing political winds, resource insecurity, and rising labour costs are redrawing trade routes and reshaping how companies source and move goods.
It would be easy to think that one of the long-term casualties of this transformation would be decarbonisation. It follows that supply chains once aligned with climate goals are being broken up and reorganised in ways that make sustainability seem like an afterthought.
Yet this is not universally the case. As countries and companies shift towards localising and diversifying where they manufacture goods, where they buy them from, and to whom they sell them, there is a parallel and growing demand for robotics and automation.
Robots used for sorting and packing goods and automated systems are already a common feature across industrial, automotive, food, beverage, and consumer goods companies. But now, with new pressures, companies are looking to double down on smarter, faster, and more resilient solutions.
Robotics and automation allow for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and agile decision-making, all of which have the potential to cut costs, strengthen supply chain resilience, and drive decarbonisation. While decarbonisation may not be what is driving their adoption, it may be one of its biggest collateral benefits.
How robotics and automation can help decarbonise the supply chain
For companies reassessing their supply chains, robotics and automation are attractive options because they enable the deglobalisation of manufacturing. While this may sound daunting, for supply chain stakeholders and robotics and automation companies, it offers opportunity.
One of the impacts of deglobalisation is shorter supply chains. Initially, this comes with inefficiencies, labour costs may rise, and economies of scale may be lost.
But for firms looking to bring manufacturing back to their home country or relocate operations to a neighbouring one, robotics and automation can offset these pains.
Crucially, any company looking to relocate manufacturing will be aiming to keep the cost the same or as close as possible to what it previously was. Introducing robotics and automation to this transition doesn’t just make this prospect more feasible but it can also make manufacturing as a whole more competitive, and greener.
With successful localisation, products no longer need to travel thousands of miles across continents, significantly reducing emissions associated with freight, especially high-carbon modes like air shipping.
Robotics and automation also allow firms to manage their energy more intelligently. Unlike traditional, human-led operations, more automated facilities can run outside of the traditional 9-to-5 or shift systems, making it possible to align production with peaks in the availability of renewable energy.
Manufacturers can then ramp up activity when renewable electricity is plentiful and scale down during peak demand, easing pressure on the grid, reducing the carbon intensity of their operations, and lowering energy costs.
Why decarbonisation may come last but certainly not least
As promising as robotics and automation may be for the decarbonisation of supply chains, the pressure companies are under means that at present it is bottom lines that need to be prioritised, not climate goals.
Robotics and automation can improve the economic profile of any company’s operations and products but only as long as the robots are cheap enough and perform well.
So, for startups to be successful in this space, they must focus on addressing exactly that, unit economics and ROI. If a startup’s solution doesn’t fix the cost and ROI proposition for a specific customer base, it will never deliver on the climate mandate.
Deploying cost effective robots creates a double benefit. Automation drives efficiency, which in turn shortens supply chains and reduces emissions.
Targeting the in-between
There are several promising technologies where decarbonisation is just one of the potential upsides among a host of other things.
For example, automation technologies that target the “in-between” layers of the supply chain, particularly in automated intralogistics. These are the often-overlooked stages where goods move from one facility to the next, like from the manufacturer’s warehouse, to customs, to port facilities, and eventually to distribution centres.
While these journeys would typically be handled by diesel-powered trucks or specialised vehicles, there’s growing momentum around automating this space to drive both cost and carbon savings.
The key here is combining more automated systems with electrification, whether this is in the automated systems themselves or in the vehicles used, to eliminate both the labour cost components and the fuel. It is this dual benefit, cutting costs and emissions, that makes the business case for decarbonised intralogistics so compelling for customers.
Automating inspection and optimising for real-time data
This dual benefit is a common thread across robotics and automation.
Take facility or infrastructure management, and how robots and automation can better leverage data to streamline operations and maintenance.
Robots can perform tasks more efficiently than humans, reducing the time and energy required to complete them. If you combine this with the fact that robots are excellent data collectors you now have an asset in your operation that can cut costs and emissions, while feeding back data to streamline your operations as it runs.
For the US, the electricity grid represents an enormous opportunity in this respect. As one of the most complex and expensive machines ever built, it faces a major upgrade cycle of new investment and new technology to meet the demands of electrification.
This is a significant opportunity for companies creating autonomous inspection robots. As supply chains are under pressure to support grid maintenance and renewal, the value of having a robot undertaking high-risk industrial facility maintenance and identifying grid maintenance issues and carrying out essential operations quickly becomes game changing.
Robots cut the labour costs of having people do a dangerous and often remote job, the emissions associated with that job, while also allowing people to focus on more high value tasks needed to renovate the grid. All the while, those robots are then able to feedback data that can help determine where resources would be best placed.
A convergence of benefits
Far from a single-issue solution, robotics and automation have the potential to reduce costs, improve productivity, increase resilience, and of course, cut emissions. In a world where supply chains are under pressure from all sides, the prospects for all forms of automation will only become more appealing.
- Digital Supply Chain
- Sustainability