Two UK logistics firms, every automation they described, and not one post removed. What decided that was the workforce strategy built around the technology, not the technology.
Independent Business Research Project (MN5028) — 11,999 words, submitted August 2026. Four senior informants across three organisations, interviewed at executive, operational and national policy level. The ground behind this section is the study's own finding: a thousand decisions a day, five hundred made, two hundred more that automation could reach, three hundred still unmade.
The question was how UK logistics and facilities management firms are adapting workforce strategy to automation, and what makes their responses diverge. Most research on this is macro-economic: it estimates which occupations are exposed to computerisation. That describes what technology can do to the demand for work. It says much less about what firms choose to do with it. So I went to the firms.
Of excellent quality, and demonstrating well-designed and executed research.
Dr Tim Ramjaun, supervisor — provisional feedback ahead of the examination board. Marks publish 5 November 2026.
A whole fuel-reconciliation procedure was automated away and the role stayed. The traffic office did not contract; the capacity released went to time with drivers.
At one firm it feeds a standing continuous-improvement process, rated at least as important as the technology itself. Without a mechanism to absorb it, a refocus is only a form of words.
The opposite of the casualisation automation is expected to bring. One uses no agency drivers at all, by internal decision.
Where automation leaves spare capacity, one firm permits reduced hours on unchanged salary — because staff who expect displacement will not help automate their own work.
A task can be fully automatable and remain human because an identifiable person must answer for it. In regulated work, legislation sets the pace, not technology.
904 staff hours of transition training, worth £35,448, sit under environmental performance rather than skills. National levy data captures spend and completions, never progression or retention.
The MSc gave me the framework. What I wanted alongside it was the operational reality, so I spent the year getting onto sites, into conferences, and in front of the people who run the work.
My story
From helping in my father's shop in Bahawalpur, through a pharmacy counter, door-to-door sales and restaurant shifts, to an MSc in London that I paid for myself. There's a ship stuck in the Suez in it too.
Read my storySecuring access to four senior informants, negotiating consent, holding a member-checking process together and producing five separately tailored editions of the findings from one controlled source taught me more about this industry than any reading list. The work I'm after is the same shape: get the detail right, hold it together through revisions, and put it in front of people in the form they need it.
If you're hiring, or you want the full dissertation, write to me and I'll reply the same day.