Podcast: Material handling goes high tech at Modex 2024

MODEX is an industry trade show that brings together manufacturing and supply chain operations as they strive to build a more agile, efficient, and transparent supply chain. This year’s event, held March 11-14 in Atlanta, Georgia, featured five keynotes, 200 educational sessions, 1,200 exhibitors showcasing the latest supply chain technology and innovations, and over 48,000 attendees. One of those attendees was Dave Blanchard, editor in chief of Material Handling & Logistics. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Dave shares highlights from the event, including the new technologies that are poised to forever change the material handling industry.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

MH&L: So Dave, for the benefit of our listeners who might not have ever been to a MODEX show before, can you give us a quick summary of what the show is all about?

DB: Sure. Yeah. That's a great idea since we have a lot of listeners of the Great Question podcast who might not have ever even attended or even heard of MODEX before. So I’ll give you the quick highlights of what MODEX is. It's basically a huge trade show, probably one of the bigger ones in the country. It's focused almost entirely on material handling, but there are some other supply chain types of solutions, including transportation, logistics, distribution, and some packaging, but it's mostly material handling. The actual name MODEX is relatively new. It dates back to the year 2012, so 12 years ago, and since it's an every-other-year show, it has only been around, you know, like six or seven times. It alternates with the much better known ProMat show, which is held on odd-numbered years in Chicago. Before 2012, the MODEX show, under a different name, was held in either Cleveland or Detroit. As someone who has lived in both Atlanta and in Cleveland, I will admit that the weather in Atlanta in March, which is when they hold the show, is usually a lot nicer than it is in Cleveland, but I still kind of miss it being held in Cleveland anyways.

At this year's MODEX show, there were at least 1,200 exhibitors. This was held at the Georgia World Congress Center, and in years past, most of it was held in Hall B, the biggest area of that convention center. And then they had some spillover into another hall. Well, this year they filled up all of Hall B and all of Hall C, the spillover area. So they created a whole new area. They also had a Hall A, which they had never used before for exhibitors, but they had filled that one up pretty well as well. I think they were expecting the final tally to be somewhere around 50,000 attendees, which is just incredible. I think two years ago, the first MODEX after the pandemic, they were around 37,00 to 38,000, I think. So that's quite considerable growth.

MH&L: That is impressive. Would you say then that the growth of MODEX reflects the overall health of the material handling industry?

DB: Yeah, that's a question I asked a lot of the exhibitors as well as the attendees. I always like to get the temperature of the room, as they say, and find out what people are really experiencing. You look at a show with exhibitors in three different halls, 1,200 exhibitors, 50,000 some attendees, and you figure, “Wow, this definitely is reflective of a very healthy and vibrant material handling community.” And to some extent, I'm sure that's true, but to some extent, maybe not so much. So just to give some historical context, it was during MODEX week, March of 2020, when the pandemic was officially announced here in the U.S. I remember just four years ago, it was kind of an eerie ghost town, sort of a vibe with a lot of the exhibitors as well as many of the attendees just not wanting to get on an airplane and travel to a big trade show. It wasn't officially a pandemic yet, but people are already wearing masks, and they weren't shaking people's hands like you used to see at a trade show. Anyways, it was actually that same week when the pandemic was declared, so COVID kind of has a close relationship in some sense I guess with MODEX.

As COVID kind of turned the supply chain upside down and sideways over the last several years, it resulted, I don't know if it's ironic or just a natural result, but it resulted in a boom time for any kind of company that sold e-commerce solutions, since, as we all know so well, for many months, people weren't really interested or even felt like they ought to be going into retail stores or restaurants or anywhere else in person. And many companies shifted their employment to, you know, work from home mode. So, a lot of their employees didn't even come into the office. They worked from home. So that meant that any company who was selling warehousing and distribution solutions that could, you know, move products rapidly through the supply chain and get them to that last mile, get them delivered, not just to a distribution center or to a loading dock but to somebody's house or to an office building. Those kind of solutions were extremely popular and very much in demand for big capital equipment sorts of purchases where people were buying forklifts and shelves and robots and any kind of big-ticket items. Those were kind of on back order for forever, as we know. Just trying to get products ordered off of Amazon, it was buried in how long it might take to get something. Well, Amazon did a great job. Every other company trying to do what Amazon was doing was finding it rather difficult, so companies wanted to kind of react and follow that Amazon model. How can we get our products made and delivered as quickly as possible so that we don't lose a sale? Many of the companies who were at MODEX this year kind of had that boom cycle going for the last couple of years, where just about anything they had, people wanted to buy and they were interested, whether it's, you know, forklifts or autonomous mobile robots or even basic things like labeling and printing. That kind of thing was very popular, very necessary to keep the supply chain going.

Whenever you have a roller coaster, you know, you're going to be at the top, which is where we were a couple of years ago. And now that roller coaster is kind of going down. Material handling historically has always been a roller coaster ride in terms of the market. So you go up and you go down, and you go up and you go down. The best indication I got from the people I talked to was that we've probably reached the bottom and are starting to go back up in terms of how eager people are, well, not just eager, but in terms of actually having a budget to purchase more solutions. If you say, “Well, there's 50,000 people at MODEX. There's a lot of eagerness, and there's a lot of interest.” It remains to be seen if that shakes out into us hitting another peak year for material handling sales. But all indications, if you just use MODEX as your bellwether, seem to be we're back to where we ought to be.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.