# Smart Warehouses: Rationale, Challenges and Solution Directions
## 4 Results
### RQ-2: What Are the Key Motivations for Adopting Smart Warehouses?  
Warehouses become more complex over time, and customer demand has taken on new forms. This results in a need to adapt to a smart warehouse. The identified key motivations are external threats, strategic advantages, increased quantity of data, warehouse complexity, operational agility, and customer demand. The most frequent key motivation is warehouse complexity, and the second one is customer demand.  
The role of warehouses has dramatically changed as customer orders have become more complex and diverse [30]. Moreover, there is a need for real-time information, a faster response time, and accuracy [3, 22, 28, 32]. Traditional warehouses/stores are no longer suitable for satisfying the demand of the new shopping habit (i.e., online shopping) [26], are no longer confined to keeping a large amount of stock-keeping units (SKU) [18, 24, 28], are incapable of responding to modern challenges and constraints in a timely matter [29], and are no longer locally based which requires a constant internet connection and new forms of protection [31].  
Current developments create a challenge for the operation agility in terms of heterogeneous resources within warehouses, as well as the highly distributed across warehouses [21, 30]. To survive in the highly competitive business environment [19], effective management of warehouses has become vital in current supply chains [17, 28]. To enhance the contribution of warehousing in supply chain performance, the use of automatic identification technology has great potential [14].  
As today's demand requires lower prices, fast delivery, and tailored products, retailers need more efficient distribution centers, with improved WMSs at the hand of automation [13, 17]. Although WMS is widely used to obtain data to optimize costs, management and operations [16], most WMSs have been designed as material-tracking systems which are incapable of providing timely and accurate order execution information due to its unpredictability and concurrency [24]. Most WMS rely on human input and do not contain automated data retrieval or real-time data. As human errors account for 80% of false information, incorrect information is inevitable [16]. Inaccurate information may lead to uncertainties and complications on both demand and supply, potential detrimental influence on the logistics [25]. Warehouse systems and supply chain actors are being merged, requiring system improvement in responsiveness, flexibility, and agility [17, 25, 29], for the (human) error-based bottleneck to be solved [16, 22, 30], and able to handle the vast amount of data acquired [32].  
An automated smart warehouse would allow more efficient order-picking and batch-handling, allowing for better customer-oriented services, offering a strategic advantage [19, 20]. Automation and the use of have grown over time as robotics, electronics, and computer technologies improved in terms of affordability, ease of use, functionality, ability to communicate with other devices [15]. Simultaneously, its complexity grows drastically, as well. To further benefit and cope with the complexity, innovation is required [15, 16]. With an increase of complexity, controlling, and interaction have become a major challenge in warehouse management. Innovation on communication between different objects is needed on three levels: object-to-environment (O2E), object-to-object (O2O), and object-to-human (O2H). Improvements in warehouse operations are ensured with safety control mechanisms, which detect potential hazards and disturbance [23, 27].