Step inside an old-school warehouse, and you might be greeted by a pretty drab sight. There’s a good chance what you’ll find is a poorly lit space filled with brown cardboard boxes and worn wooden pallets, all piled on gray cement floors.
But brighter palettes may soon become the norm. The new tools and technologies that have flooded the market in recent years have brought an unexpected side effect. In addition to the beeps and whirs and hums of high-speed automation, the new equipment has also sparked an explosion of color.
Nowhere was that trend more obvious than at the recent ProMat trade show, where suppliers gathered at Chicago’s cavernous McCormick Place to show off the latest material handling products. Like a botanical garden, the booths were festooned with brightly colored banners, and company employees often sported matching shirts or color-coordinated sneakers. And as noted, a lot of the equipment was pretty colorful itself.
Part of the explanation for that lies in the classic marketing ploy of branding your company’s equipment with an instantly recognizable hue. Shopping for conveyors? Walk the exhibit aisles and you could find Beumer Group’s equipment marked in blue, Intralox’s in red, or Interroll’s and SSI Schaefer’s in yellow. Looking for racks? Interlake Mecalux uses orange, while Steel King uses green. And every lift truck brand has its own color, such as Raymond red, UniCarriers blue, and Big Joe and Jungheinrich in different shades of yellow.
But the approach also has a more strategic intent. In a world where most warehouses deploy a mix of equipment from various vendors, the color-coding allows visitors to know at a glance what make of machinery is on the floor. And that makes life easier for maintenance and repair workers who need to choose the right tools or replacement parts.
Safety is another benefit of picking brighter, more vibrant paints. After all, stationary architecture like railings, stairs, and exits have long been painted in garish colors to promote visibility. And your employees have probably been required to wear orange and yellow vests on the job for years. The same logic holds for moving vehicles, like the forklifts that cruise the warehouse floor.
And in case you haven’t noticed, the biggest trend in fulfillment nowadays is mobility, as in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Vast numbers of those vehicles are now being deployed in large DCs, and a quick look around the ProMat floor showed that the robot-makers have gotten on board the color train too. You could see shades of blue on Agility Robotics’ robots, Brightpick’s AMRs, Locus Robotics’ order-picking robots, and Geek+’s AMRs. Green was the color for Agilox’s AGVs (automated guided vehicles) and AMRs and for Pickle Robot Co.’s warehouse robots. Red was for InVia Robotics and AutoStore. Black was in style over at Berkshire Grey. And gray and orange “livery” was the obvious choice for, well, GreyOrange.
Splashy colors have been the norm for decades on assets used throughout the global supply chain, including trucks, shipping containers, locomotives, cargo planes, and containerships. But now the modern distribution center has gotten into the game, using “bright” branding to enhance marketing, maintenance, and safety. And judging by the sight of the ProMat trade show floor, that expanded spectrum can even make a vast convention center or warehouse space a slightly cheerier place to work.
