Technology Integration in Warehouse Storage and Dispatch Operations: A Field-Grounded State-of-the-Art Review and Research Agenda for Latin American Distribution Centers

The convergence of e-commerce growth, thin margins, and tight service windows has turned the warehouse into the critical node where supply-chain performance is won or lost, and where a wave of Industry 4.0 technologies—computer vision, automatic identification, collaborative and mobile robotics, mixed reality, and optimization coupled with digital twins—is now being deployed. Yet adoption in Latin American distribution centers remains uneven, and the literature rarely connects the survey of available technologies to the problems that operators actually prioritize on the floor. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of technology integration in storage and dispatch operations, grounded in a structured field diagnostic of five distribution facilities visited in Colombia and the United States across grocery hard-discount, automotive/motorcycle distribution, motorcycle assembly, textile distribution, and cross-border third-party logistics. Combining the field evidence with the academic literature, we organize the domain into three integration layers: perception (E1: computer vision and automatic identification), decision (E2: optimization and simulation-based decision support, including digital twins), and orchestration (E3: yard, dock, and internal-transport management). For each layer, we synthesize the literature, map it to observed operational pain points through a documented coding path, and identify gaps. We find that vision is the most reusable asset across heterogeneous operations, that digital twins deliver value only above a scale threshold, and that four cross-cutting determinants—interoperability with incumbent warehouse-management systems, the human practices of the workforce, software and data integration, and an explicit adoption threshold—govern whether any deployment succeeds. We close with testable propositions and a ten-year research-and-development agenda for the region.