Workflow automation increases productivity 20%, find Zebra and Oxford Economics

Supply chain operations must justify their investments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation. New research by Zebra Technologies Corp. and Oxford Economics found that improving frontline workflows can improve profitability and enhance the customer experience.

Zebra commissioned a combination of surveys and econometric analysis with Oxford Economics. The participants included 1,000 senior leaders across retail (400), manufacturing (400), and transportation and logistics (T&L) sectors (200) from the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., Germany, India, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Their focus areas included inventory management, quality control, delivery operations, material handling, and loss prevention. A regression analysis was applied to correlate workflow improvements with financial performance metrics.

“Getting this data quantified and getting it out was really important for us because there are some headlines that say 95% of all the businesses implementing AI don’t see value,” said Joe White, chief product and solutions officer at Zebra Technologies. “That’s simply not true. It was important to educate our customers and partners around the world about what’s really happening in the market by getting quantitative data.”

“A lot that happens in retail also applies to hospitality and healthcare as well,” he told Automated Warehouse. “We see tremendous opportunity across the board. We have a lot of detail on what’s been implemented, what’s been piloted, and what percentage of the market is penetrated at this point, so those were particularly good insights.”

Frontline optimization drives growth, finds Oxford Economics

If the top 20 organizations from the Forbes Global 2,000 list in retail, manufacturing, and T&L “achieved meaningful improvements in their frontline workflows,” Oxford Economics estimated that each company could earn an average of $3 billion in higher revenue, and add an average of $120 million in profit.

The research found that improved workflows can have a definite impact. For example, retailers reported a 21% improvement in customer satisfaction, manufacturers cited a 19% increase in employee productivity, and T&L leaders reported a 21% increase in productivity with better workflows.

In addition, the study indicated that AI investments can help organizations achieve real-time visibility, generate actionable insights, and improve efficiency. Organizations that adopted AI, automation, and data with human expertise to optimize business processes reported significant gains. Respondents said:

• Retailers achieved up to 1.8% increases in revenue growth and profitability through improvements in their prioritized workflow of inventory management.
• Manufacturers optimizing their top workflow of quality control and assurance grew revenue by 2.4% and increased profitability by 1.4%.
• T&L firms optimizing key delivery and inventory workflows increased revenue growth by up to 3.4%, with a similar increase in profitability.

“Retail, manufacturing, and logistics are being redefined at the workflow level – where speed, visibility, and precision drive growth and elevate frontline productivity and improve customer experiences,” stated White. “Intelligent operations simplify complexity by combining the best of advanced technologies with the people on the frontline, enabling organizations to adapt to rapid change and thrive in competitive markets.”

Investments in AI begin delivering tangible benefits

According to the study:

• Retailers are piloting AI to address critical areas such as loss prevention, risk detection, and inventory optimization.
• Over two-thirds of T&L organizations and nearly half of manufacturers are deploying AI for inventory management, demand forecasting, and predictive analytics.
• Advanced tools, such as RFID and machine vision, are central to enhancing operational visibility and efficiency across industries.

At its recent ZONE user event and Frontline AI Summit, Zebra Technologies got feedback from about 200 customers. Attendees shared their roadmaps and shared experiences from their pilot programs, said White.

“Members of our customer advisory board said, ‘Help us figure out how to use AI to drive productivity of our workforce and deliver a better customer experience,'” he recalled. “The third point was revenue, which is probably the least of those, although the CEO of every company wants to tie it to revenues somehow.”

“[The events featured] a very open dialogue of sharing what’s working well, what’s not working, and what don’t we know,” White added. “As we digitize more of the workflows in our customers’ use cases using technologies like RFI and machine vision, it is a journey.”

He also pointed out that the company‘s autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) use AI to navigate, help associates accurately pick for fulfillment, and enable healthcare organizations use big data without violating privacy regulations.

Zebra applies multimodal scanning to help customers grow

Zebra Technologies has been helping to digitize supply chains for 55 years with barcodes, mobile computers, and handheld scanners, noted White. The company is now amplifying visibility at the edge with RFID, machine vision, and multimodal scanning. AI is helping with scaling, ingesting data, and automating actions that need to take place within operations, he explained.

“For example, at a large T&L customer that does cross-docking, for over five years, we’ve been doing RFID tagging in its facility, and we get 99.9% accuracy,” said White. “What has changed is it used to have an operator standing in front of a screen waiting for something to go wrong. The company no longer has to do that because you can train a large language model [LLM] to automatically take action when it sees certain events. And that provides scaling. This allows it to reach all 2,800 of its cross-dock facilities without having to add 2,800 employees.”

With machine vision at the edge, Zebra’s fixed or mobile sensors can now look at a shelf facing, and agentic AI can determine what needs correcting and assign tasks, according to White. This has a direct correlation with top-line revenue growth.

In addition, with its multimodal technology, not only is Zebra segmenting all the products and determining their attributes from labels, but it can also identify misplaced or recalled products, as well as empty locations that need restocking without requiring an associate to scan each item individually.

“It’s not just barcode data, RFID data, or picture data — that’s what I mean by ‘multimodal,'” White asserted. “At Manifest and ProMat this year, we saw great interest in inventory scanning and management. Thanks to advances in AI, there’s predictive analytics, and you can compare stock keeping across facilities over time.”

Total Wine required total visibility, says Zebra

Zebra claimed that its intelligent automation can help businesses capture and act on real-time data, streamline repetitive tasks, and reduce manual errors. It also said they can simplify and accelerate workflows for increased productivity and “continuously drive innovation at the point of work” with AI.

The Lincolnshire, Ill.-based company said its “Better Every Day” philosophy entails “empowering organizations with automation and AI to create new ways of working that make everyday life better.”

“Zebra Technologies empowers organizations of all sizes globally to continuously drive better processes and adapt to changing conditions,” said Bill Burns, CEO of Zebra Technologies. “Our powerful portfolio of intelligent automation, asset visibility, and connected frontline solutions is purpose-built to support modern workflows and improve the way work gets done every day.”

White cited the example of Total Wine, which prides itself on its customer experience. However, during its most profitable time period, the retailer has to hire 30% more people and needed to train them on how to do things such as recommend a wine to pair with lamb.

Zebra found in its first pilot, which was narrowly focused on a few product lines and representatives, that associates were actually disincentivized to use the tool.

“We now do 100% of 15,000 SKUs, and we learned that once one associate has that capability, everyone wants it,” he said. “A customer may remember that a bottle had a duck on the label, and LLMs can inform the associate what to recommend in that scenario. You can’t plan for that.”