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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…
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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…
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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…
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Can we talk about robots? 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…
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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…
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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…
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In 2016, Empresas Dimerc, the parent company of Dimerc Office, Chile’s largest distributor of office supplies to business, automated the picking processes in its 216,000-square-foot distribution center in Santiago. Among its goals: To become the most modern distributor of office supplies in its home country, but to also rival the best of its peers worldwide. “We are continuously evaluating process…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“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,…
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“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…
From geometry preparation to AI-assisted analysis, integrated CFD workflows…
Software-based GripperAI manages mixed picking through basic geometry
Safety, communication and motion control components enable smooth operation
North America’s largest robotics and automation event winds down
