Figure A2
The chart is titled “Today question mark” on the left and “In five years question mark” on the right. It presents two sets of horizontal stacked bars for 22 priorities, labeled on the vertical axis on the left from top to bottom as “Uptime, reliability,” “Scalability, opportunity for up slash downscaling solution,” “Order accuracy,” “Flexibility to handle demand variation,” “Total Cost of Ownership (incl. service, maintenance etc),” “Throughput, solution’s flow capacity,” “Picking efficiency (order lines per hour),” “Speed (solutions total order lead time to customer),” “Response time for support slash service,” “Service and warranties,” “Opportunity for staff reduction,” “Surface efficiency (ability to use warehouse area),” “Implementation time,” “Integration slash Compatibility with current solution,” “Future risk for spare part shortages,” “Opportunity for turn-key solutions,” “Environmental friendliness and energy efficiency,” “Purchasing price,” “Innovation, degree of ‘leading edge solutions,’” “Previous relation and experience with provider,” “Automation provider can operate (and recruit staff),” and “Other aspects.” Each priority is represented by two horizontal bars, one for “Today question mark” and one for “In five years question mark,” both stretching from 0 percent to 100 percent across a horizontal axis at the top. Each bar is segmented and color-coded to show the proportion of Swedish retailer responses in each category according to the key: “Don’t know,” “1 (very low degree),” “2,” “3,” “4 (medium),” “5,” “6,” and “7 (to a very high degree).” The vertical axis on the right of both charts is labeled “Mean.” The right vertical axis for the left chart lists the mean in the order 6.55, 6.53, 6.31, 6.13, 6.03, 6.17, 6.27, 6.00, 5.90, 5.81, 5.78, 5.63, 5.16, 5.41, 5.29, 4.88, 4.19, 5.38, 4.09, 4.22, 3.03, and 3.17. The right vertical axis for the right chart lists the mean in the order 6.71, 6.55, 6.52 caret, 6.45 asterisk, 6.29, 6.27, 6.26, 6.16, 5.97, 5.94, 5.90, 5.90 caret, 5.74 double asterisk, 5.52, 5.45, 5.32 asterisk, 5.23 quadruple asterisk, 5.13, 4.43 asterisk, 4.39, 3.45 asterisk, and 2.67. The segments of each bar run left to right in ascending order, showing the distribution for each rating, so, for example, the “Uptime, reliability” bar has a larger section of high-value colors on the right side in the “In five years?” column, reflecting increased importance. On the far right of each bar, the mean value is displayed, such as “6.71,” with asterisks marking significant differences between “Today question mark” and “In five years question mark,” following the legend: “Asterisks indicate significance mean difference with T-test. caret p less than 0.1,” “asterisk p less than 0.05,” “double asterisk p less than 0.001,” “triple asterisk p less than 0.0001,” and “quadruple asterisk p less than 0.00001.” At the bottom, the text reads, “Note(s): The comparison of the case companies with responses from a larger sample of Swedish retailers (n equals 31) showed that the overall patterns were similar. The highest ranked were reliability (6.55), scalability (6.53), order accuracy (6.31), picking efficiency (6.27), throughput flow capacity (6.17), and flexibility (6.13). The lowest-ranked aspects (today) included outsourcing of operations (3.03), environmental aspects (4.19), degree of innovation (4.22), and previous relationships with the provider (4.22). Five years on, almost all aspects were ranked as more important, except purchasing price. A closer analysis (t-test) of the differences between present and future showed significant increases for certain lower-ranked and higher-ranked evaluation aspects such as flexibility, up-time, and order accuracy. Finally, the retailers’ different views on the relations with automation providers are interesting. For the two lowest-ranked aspects, relationship with provider and the automation provider manages operations, two clusters were observed. One with retailers managing operations in-house, and another that more clearly develops a relationship slash collaboration with the provider.”Ranking of AWS evaluation aspects (n = 31)