Poor labour planning isn’t just a headache anymore, it’s starting to look like an existential risk.
Last week’s UK budget only reinforced what many warehouse operators already know: labour is harder to find, and more expensive to keep. Right now, businesses are juggling rising costs, growing demand, and a shrinking talent pool – using homemade spreadsheets, last-minute workarounds, and heroic managers holding it all together.
Let’s put it plainly: if your warehouse runs 500 operatives at around £30k each, that’s £15 million in people power generally managed on a patchwork of imports, exports, macros, manual entry, and fixes your IT team usually can’t help with.
This feels like the moment to step back and ask: how do we plan smarter, move faster, and build resilience, before a crunch turns into a crisis?
The Chancellor’s decisions are out of our hands. But how we respond? That’s up to us. Who’s ready to take on the challenge?
Phil, CEO
Our November 5th webinar – Rethinking Labour Planning: Solving the Gap Everyone Overlooks – is now available on YouTube. If you can’t dedicate 45m to watching the whole thing, it’s still worth skimming through the transcript, as it contains lots of food for thought from Sarah Booth and Paul Hunters, two super experienced operators.
We’d have liked a bit more detail, but this overview of how Deloitte partnered with a Fortune 500 healthcare company to scale GenAI across inventory planning, resonated with us, if only because our solution is also about helping organisations ‘make smarter, faster and more data-driven decisions’ (5 mins).
Gartner has predicted that 70% of large organisations will adopt AI-based supply chain forecasting to predict future demand by 2030, but that adoption is often hindered by a lack of clear vision among supply chain leaders, resistant employees, and ongoing data challenges. We come across these obstacles too; our take – 2030 is too long to wait to start exploring areas like this; if you’re not, we can guarantee that at least one of your competitors will be (8 mins).
If you haven’t had a chance to watch the BBC’s interview with Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO), we think it’s worth 28 minutes of your time. But you could do worse than spend 2 minutes reading through our overview, on LinkedIn.
McKinsey’s latest survey – The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation – provides a good overview of how quickly the market is changing. It’s also good on uncovering how different industries and functions are getting onboard (24 mins).
You’ll need a subscription to (or trial for) The Economist to read The End of the Rip-Off Economy but, in a nutshell, artificial intelligence is empowering consumers by minimising or removing market asymmetries (10 mins – subscription required).
We thought this was super thought-provoking; a new AI scientist, Kosmos, has been announced, that read 1,500 papers, ran 42,000 lines of code, and produced a research report, in less than 12 hours – something it would take an average human scientist about six months to do. You can find out more here.
As always, we’re continuing to learn from and share with people from various industries as we continue to build out our product – a labour planning tool that makes things Predyktable (see what we did there?) by not just showing you what’s wrong, but by recommending what you can do next and then coordinating your other systems, based on your data, and constraints (think budget, SLAs etc.).
If you want to know more and are up for a 15-min chat to swap insights and share ideas, drop us a line.
Until next month, Team Predyktable