With the introduction of online shopping, The Indian retail landscape has seen a momentous change over the last few years. This evolution is now further aggravated by the unwillingness to shop from physical retail stores due to the pandemic. Veritably, according to a report by IBEF, the Indian e-commerce market is expected to grow to US$ 200 billion by 2026.

Globally, growth in the ecommerce industry has also galvanized companies to automate fulfilment centres. Warehouse automation could also optimize workflows and boost efficiency. Where one day deliveries have become a norm nowadays, it has also overstretched the ecommerce giants. This ultimately led to the need for smarter warehouses and hence, dark warehouses came into existence. These warehouses are primarily the ones where the human input is limited. The majority of the work is done using robots and automated control systems. Here, the receival of goods is not automated but once the goods are received, dark warehouses work on their own. From picking up the products after they have been logged in the system (Warehouse Management Systems) to later delivering them to packing stations, the entire process is automated and is carried on by robots. The robots are fully capable of working in isolation and may either follow predesigned routes or use sensors to avoid other robots or equipment.

One such example of dark warehouses is Amazon’s fulfilment centres in the US where Amazon uses small robots simply called ‘drives’ mostly to deliver large stacks of products to human workers, by following set paths around the warehouse.

In countries like India, human workers are still relatively cheap and sometimes more cost-effective. Also, developing smarter warehouses is not cheap and exist only in the most technologically advanced countries in the world. In India, dark warehouses may not come into play in the coming years but one cannot deny the fact that automation at some level is the future.