91% of Ecommerce Logistics Leaders Approved Automation Despite Lack of Maintenance Readiness
News related to:MultiSensor AI Holdings, Inc · 3 min read
MultiSensor AI Holdings, Inc. has released findings from a survey of 152 reliability and maintenance practitioners and VP-level operations leaders in ecommerce distribution and logistics. The survey, titled "The Uptime Economy: 2026 Report," reveals a significant gap between the implementation of automation and the readiness to maintain it.
According to the report, 91% of respondents have approved, implemented, or integrated new automation investments, even when their teams were not fully prepared or equipped to maintain them. Nearly half of the respondents (49%) reported that this situation had occurred more than once. As ecommerce distribution and logistics facilities continue to invest heavily in automation, this readiness gap is emerging as a critical issue.
The survey also found that most reliability and maintenance practitioners (99%) are confident their facilities can catch early signs of asset degradation before failure. However, 82% of practitioners have dismissed sensor alerts that turned out to be real asset failures. Eighty-three percent of practitioners have experienced failures that, in hindsight, showed warning signs they missed or deprioritized. Nearly a third (31%) of respondents said this had happened more than once.
Asim Akram, Chief Executive Officer of MultiSensor AI, commented, "The automation business case almost never includes the plan to keep it running. Ninety-one percent of the leaders we surveyed knew their team was not ready and moved forward anyway. That is not a technology gap. It is a planning gap, and it shows up two years later as unplanned downtime."
The monitoring behind maintenance overconfidence is thinner than it suggests. Only 10% of practitioners continuously monitor all of their critical assets in real time, 24/7, while two-thirds (66%) monitor periodically, on a scheduled or calendar-based interval. Nearly all respondents (98%) have at least one asset that represents a true single point of failure capable of halting operations.
Luke Grice Lowe, Director of Global Reliability and Maintenance Programs at MultiSensor AI, added, "A missed warning sign is rarely a case of someone ignoring a problem. It is a case of no one being there when the signal appeared. Degradation does not wait for the next scheduled inspection, so when a team is checking on a calendar interval, the misses are built into the schedule rather than into the people."
The cost of limited visibility runs in both directions. Eighty-six percent of practitioners have taken a critical asset out of service for replacement or major repair, only to determine later that it had significantly more usable life remaining. Twenty-seven percent say it has happened more than once.
Additional findings from the survey include: - Unplanned downtime is rising. Eighty percent of respondents say their facility experienced six or more unplanned downtime events affecting fulfillment, sortation, or distribution operations in the past 12 months. - Unplanned downtime events have increased compared with three years ago, according to 36% of respondents. - Downtime costs could wipe out automation investments. Ninety-five percent of VP-level respondents say the potential financial impact of a major downtime event would match (55%) or exceed (40%) their annual automation investment at a facility. - Most facilities (55%) invested $5 to $25 million in automation technology over the past three years, while more than a third (35%) invested $25 million to $100 million during the same period. - Nearly two-thirds (64%) of VPs say their facility does not track uptime at the executive or board level. - Reliability workforces are under pressure. Thirty-five percent of all respondents say a lean workforce and not enough skilled technicians is a top barrier to improving uptime.
The survey highlights the challenges faced by ecommerce distribution and logistics facilities in maintaining their automated systems and the potential financial impact of unplanned downtime. MultiSensor AI's findings underscore the need for better planning and workforce management to ensure the successful implementation and maintenance of automation technologies.