A friend of mine is having a dickens of a time selling her home in Columbus, Ohio. It’s in a great neighborhood with one of the best school systems in the area. And, at over 4,000 square feet with a nice big yard it’s the kind of house people my age aspired to. What’s not to like? Apparently, it’s the size. The realtors have told her that the houses selling right now are smaller because today’s buyer doesn’t want to take care of all that property. Sometimes, it pays to think small. Something similar might be happening in the warehouse…
It’s November, which means the holiday season is right around the corner. For most retailers, gearing up for peak is a matter of getting the right inventory in the right locations and hiring enough people to get the projected orders out the door. Those tasks are daunting enough. But, how do you recover when a facility you were counting on for the upcoming season catches fire roughly nine weeks before the first of November? Shawn Curran (left) is executive vice president of Global Supply Chain and Product Operations for Gap Inc. and Kevin Kuntz (right) is senior vice president of…
On Wednesday, I wrapped up my attendance at this year’s annual MHI conference. I have to say, it was one of the most energetic MHI conferences I’ve attended in recent years. A lot of that had to do, I think, with the genuine interest in how technology is changing in our space, and how it may impact the industry going forward. There are a number of new tools out there, from digital like predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to robotics. But with that interest and excitement there’s a recognition that we’re at a certain tipping point. A lot…
And, not just robots. Let’s add Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to the conversation, all of which have been on the menu at this year’s conference. They are, without question, the technologies that have gotten the attention of the investment community – one of the reasons there are more startups in all of these disciplines than you can shake a stick at. They’re also the building blocks of the digitization of the supply chain. At the same time, they can be confusing; we tend to think of them as separate things without understanding the relationship between them; and,…
If it’s September, it must be Park City. For the last 15 years, I’ve been trekking to Park City, Utah the weekend after Labor Day to attend Dematic’s Material Handling & Logistics Conference. Full disclosure: For the last several years, I’ve been on the conference planning committee. But, like that guy who was a customer before he bought the razor company, I was a long-time attendee before participating in planning. Besides the fact that it’s a fabulous location, the food is great and the keynote speakers and entertainment are top notch (this year, its Colin Powell and John Fogerty), what…
Sure, it’s a cliché, but sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention. Or, at least, that’s how the Alabama Robotics Technology Park came about a few years ago in Decatur, Ala., according to Brooks Kracke, president and CEO of the North Alabama Industrial Development Association, and Rick Maroney, director of the technology park. As the two tell it, a former governor was talking to a senior executive from a local manufacturing company that had been thinking of expanding his operations. At the time of the conversation, the executive was perturbed because his assembly line was down. “Why don’t you…
Last month, I received a copy of the 4th annual survey of manufacturers and distributors by Sikich, a Chicago-based accounting and consulting firm. You can download the whole survey here. The survey goes out to Sikich clients as well as others across the U.S. Before looking at the results, I had a chance to talk to Jerry Murphy, the Sikich partner in charge of the survey about what struck him by the results. “A lot of what comes out of this are best practices, and that allows us to make suggestions on what business leaders should be doing to address…
Five years is a lifetime in the world of technology, but maybe you remember how Jeff Bezos turned the supply chain world upside down in December 2013. That’s when he dropped a bombshell on 60 Minutes, walked correspondent Charlie Rose and his production team “into a mystery room at the Amazon offices and revealed a secret R&D project: ‘Octocopter’ drones that will fly packages directly to your doorstep in 30 minutes.” Faster than you can say “same day delivery,” drones were the buzzword du jour at supply chain conferences, much like RFID following the infamous Walmart mandate about a decade…
John Hill knows a thing or two about technology innovation. In a career that spans 50 years, Hill was at the forefront of the development of industrial applications for bar code scanning and radio frequency identification and the first warehouse management software systems. There’s a reason he remembers that the first implementation of bar code scanning outside of point of sale in grocery and retail was in October 1971 at Buick’s Plant 10. “I carried the 50-pound scanner into Buick to give them the demonstration,” Hill recalls. Hill has not rested on his laurels. Still a director at St. Onge,…
I had a chance to talk with Tony Uphoff, Thomas’s president and CEO, at Monday’s reception in Nashville at ISM 2018. While we both work in supply chain management today, we share a long background in consumer magazine publishing in New York. We both were witness to the disruption caused by digitization on long-standing, and once successful, business models in that world. At the same time, Thomas has tried to get ahead of the curve by transitioning from a print-based company – what we all knew as Thomas Register – to a digital native organization. After, it occurred to me…
“There’s something happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear”….Stephen Stills A few weeks ago I published Robotics at a tipping point. The piece focused on how 3PLs like DHL, GEODIS and Quiet Logistics are deploying mobile collaborative robots in their e-commerce fulfillment operations. One of the things that struck me is that while the implementations we’re seeing are small, it feels as if the market for mobile collaborative robotics is at a tipping point in materials handling, and it feels as if the adoption rate, poised to become in the next three to five years just another tool in…
“There’s something happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear”….Stephen Stills Over the years, I’ve watched the adoption of any number of new technologies, from WMS to voice recognition systems to shuttle systems. In all three examples, technologies that we take for granted today were, in reality, fairly slow to become part of what Jim Rice at MIT calls “the dominant design” - just another tool in the tool kit. I’m going to go out on a limb, but I’m now convinced that robotic materials handling is at a tipping point in materials handling, and it feels as if the…