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Area Development - Site Selection, Facility Planning and Workforce Development

Ensuring Business Continuity While Focusing on Accelerating Automation

In the face of current risks, business will focus on supply chain resiliency, accelerating automation, and increased investments in telecommunications and renewable energy.

Q2 2020
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, I think that the outlook is positive in the near- and long term for corporate site location projects.

The current environment is teaching us that the need to ensure business continuity in the face of exceptional risks will be driving many supply chain location decisions in the future. More localized supply chains will be a way for companies to increase resilience and minimize disruptions as the probability for exceptional events of a global impact increases. This will generate increased activity from corporations seeking to re-shore, move, or establish new operations closer to their markets. Also, the need to make supply chains more resilient, will push corporations to require suppliers to be closer to their operations. This may increase the number of facilities that will be needed, as it may not be feasible any longer, from a business continuity standpoint, to supply several locations from one centralized facility.

It may not be feasible any longer, from a business continuity standpoint, to supply several locations from one centralized facility. I also think that corporations will most likely be more focused on accelerating their automation processes to minimize the dependence of production operations on labor force. The same will happen in terms of automated supply chains. I think that changes we saw coming eventually, in terms of automation, are going to be accelerated. The need for corporations to minimize risks in the face of exceptional events, and also to become much more efficient, will drive automation more rapidly.

This will also drive the need for increased investments in telecommunications infrastructure that can support a faster pace of automation from corporations. And increased investments in renewable energy infrastructure will also be critical to support robustly automated operations.

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