ProMat 2023 is in the books! What a show. This was the largest ever ProMat event, with 50,924 attendees and 1,051 exhibitors from the manufacturing and supply chain community gathering at McCormick Place in Chicago, March 20-23, 2023.
The show drew 12% more registered attendees from the last pre-pandemic show, in 2019, with event attendees coming from 178 countries. Fortune 500 companies, top 100 retailers, and consumer goods firms all were represented at ProMat.
The big topic of the event? Digital supply chain solutions. Three dominant themes stood out in conversations we had during the week with hundreds of visitors to the Phantom Auto booth:
For Phantom Auto, ProMat provided an opportunity to show how far we've come in a year since winning the MHI Innovation Award for Best New Product at MODEX 2022. We're now deployed with multiple enterprise companies around the United States, including 1/3 of the top 12 3PLs in the country.
To show our solution at work, we brought a team of five Phantom Auto remote operators to ProMat. They were unloading trucks and moving materials at customer facilities each day during the show, remotely driving forklifts in Texas, Tennessee, and California—all directly from the show floor in Chicago.
As our remote operators drove on their workstations at ProMat, large video monitors mounted overhead showed their corresponding forklifts in operation at sites up to thousands of miles away.
Throughout the week at ProMat we held a series of chats at our booth about topics from Phantom's layered safety approach to ways remote drivers can benefit a company's bottom line, and showcased center rider and counterbalance vehicles outfitted with Phantom hardware.
We also hosted a discussion with Kristi Montgomery, VP of Innovation and R&D at Kenco Group, on expanding employment opportunities in the supply chain through diversity and innovation.
New technologies were clearly top of mind for many ProMat attendees. A pre-show survey of ProMat registrants showed many were ready to invest, with 85% of respondents saying they had buying power, and 38% saying they planned to spend more than $1MM over the next 18 months. 66% of respondents said they were looking for solutions for distribution centers or warehouses.
After the pandemic and supply chain unpredictability of the past few years, optimizing for efficiency and ease of implementation were recurring themes.
Another major talking point? The labor shortage in logistics. Many Phantom booth visitors talked about the difficulty not just in hiring, but retaining talent, too.
The data bears this out. Per The Burning Glass Institute, the warehousing sector is showing moving annual quit rates of nearly 40%, as manual workers are job hopping at historical rates.
In the 2023 MHI Annual Industry Report, workforce issues topped the list of supply chain challenges, with 57% of survey respondents rating hiring and retaining workers as extremely or very challenging.
Potential workers have more options now—like driving for delivery apps instead of driving a forklift.
We heard how the labor shortage is driving adoption of new technologies—like Phantom's remote operation solution, which enables logistics operators to hire from outside the typical commuting distances of their warehouses. Our remote operation technology provides facilities in hard-to-staff areas with access to remote workers who can work from anywhere, as Phantom Auto remote operators did from the show in Chicago.
The safety benefits of human-assisted autonomous vehicles came up a lot too. There's still hesitancy around fully-autonomous warehouses. With worker safety a concern across the supply chain, keeping control of the vehicle in human hands with complementary automated on-vehicle safety features including blue positioning indicator lights and an active horn were seen as the best of both worlds.
At Phantom Auto, we specialize in remote operation of logistics vehicles. We're solving labor issues in the supply chain with our remote operation technology. Phantom helps enterprise companies in the logistics industry tap into drivers from anywhere, connecting people who want to work with jobs that need to be filled.
With Phantom's layered safety methodology, autonomous vehicles stay in the control of human hands remotely. Our proprietary software delivers secure, low-latency communications over multiple wireless networks for safe, reliable vehicle control.
We'd like to hear about your material handling operation. Schedule a demo with our team of experts, who can consult with you on the best way to get started with remotely operated material handling solutions.
Phantom Auto specializes in remote operation of all logistics vehicles. Phantom’s human-centric interoperable solutions enable people to remotely supervise, assist, and drive vehicle fleets from up to thousands of miles away—including forklifts, robots, trucks, and more. By decoupling labor from location, the company increases labor access and retention, safety, productivity, and resilience across the supply chain. For more information about Phantom, visit www.phantomauto.com.