Shopfloor Of Ancillaries

LogiMAT India 2026 reveals how shopfloor automation is reshaping transport efficiency and logistics economics

- Upendra Kasbekar

As India's logistics ecosystem prepares for its next phase of scale, the focus is shifting from highways and fleets to the complex operations inside warehouses and shopfloors.

LogiMAT India 2026 in Mumbai highlighted this transition clearly. The exhibition emphasised integrated automation robots, intelligent material-handling systems and warehouse software over standalone machines. With India's logistics costs still at 13-14 percent of GDP, inefficiencies such as labour-intensive picking, inconsistent productivity and poor material visibility continue to dilute gains made on roads. LogiMAT demonstrated that meaningful efficiency gains will come from synchronising warehouses, shopfloors and vehicles into a single, predictable logistics continuum.

Warehouses as the New Bottleneck and Opportunity

As manufacturing output rises and e-commerce, retail distribution and industrial supply chains expand, warehouses have quietly become the new bottleneck. The challenge is not storage alone, but speed, accuracy and repeatability. Traditional manual warehouses struggle to cope with SKU proliferation, shorter order cycles and multi-shift operations. Labour availability, training costs and human error further complicate the equation. At LogiMAT India 2026, this reality was reflected in the diversity of automation solutions on display. Companies were not pitching futuristic concepts; they were offering deployable systems designed for India's mixed reality of greenfield logistics parks and brownfield industrial warehouses. The common theme across exhibitors was simple: automation is no longer optional, it is foundational to scale.

From Automation to Throughput