Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3 - 23

WAREHOUSES

BY MATT DAVIDSON

Essential Changes
Several factors will drive the next generation warehouse, including
a drive for more visibility.
Supply chain operations are largely based around when events are expected to happen in a controlled environment, with little or no ability to react in
real-time to the millions of micro disruptions that may occur. These daily
disturbances, even as simple as delayed arrival of a shipment due to traffic,
create billions of dollars of lost productivity every year in the supply chain.
As the perception of supply chains shifts
from a cost burden to a competitive differentiator, optimization and efficiency
have become essential to success in
today's world focused on fast delivery.
To support this transition, the importance of real-time data and analysis is
rising rapidly.

Moving Garbage In and Out
The vision towards the future of the
fully autonomous warehouse is simply
not there yet (with some very high-profile prototypes as exceptions). In the
meantime, many operators are taking
a step-by-step approach to increasing
efficiency and improving operational
insight through data-driven analysis to
solve specific problems. This explains
why Forrester predicts the broadly titled
"IoT Solutions" market will reach over
$400 billion by 2023, with inventory and
supply chain management responsible
for over a quarter of that.
Both human and machines' decision-making capabilities are narrowed
due to the quality of data available. By
leveraging the advances in sensor technology to allow quicker, lower-cost deployments, operators can collect a wider
range of data, such as visual and spatial,
at a much lower cost than past solutions.
The ability to collect data at a large scale,

with higher quality and better context,
has the power to release artificial intelligence to manage real-time operational
decisions in logistics.

Where Should You Begin?
Loading docks are an obvious place to
start when looking to enhance operational efficiency, given that all goods
are transferred through them. Inefficiency and lost productivity at the
dock have been estimated to cost in the
billions of dollars per year in the United
States alone.
To increase visibility into truck dock
operations, there are a variety of solutions that allow sensors and other devices to be placed there, to monitor dwell
time and feed information back to the
dock scheduling systems in real-time.
Some of the more interesting solutions
go one step further by taking a visual
approach to monitoring both inside and
outside the truck dock, then using artificial intelligence and visual analytics to
analyze the efficiency of every event and
asset while the truck rests at the dock.
While these solutions provide significant value as standalone deployments,
the output can be transported back
into transportation and warehouse
management systems, which creates
an opportunity for productive adjust-

ments and task prioritization based
on the real-time data from the truck or
distribution center.

Activity and Productivity
Another valuable use-case in the logistics center is worker and equipment
monitoring. Workers can suffer from
periods of inactivity due to the unavailability of key equipment to complete a
given task, similar to the truck "dwell
time" issue mentioned above. Today's
technologies are finally enabling highly
accurate GPS-like information indoors.
With the ability to determine the locations of both people and assets, workers
can be paired with available, optimal
equipment to accomplish their task in
the least amount of time.
Further, worker and equipment
paths can be analyzed over time to see
broader patterns and density. Machine
learning can identify "hot spots" and
"cold spots," providing insight into
better resource distribution and inventory location.

What's To Come?
These are just a couple of ways that
real-time data can begin to transform warehouse operations, but this
is only the beginning. As more data
is collected and analyzed about the
actual real-time physical space, the
data will enable instant adjustments to
priorities, tasks, and assignments in response to "on the ground" conditions,
generating significant productivity and
efficiency improvements.
Matt Davidson is the vice president of
Product and Marketing at Locix, Inc, a Silicon
Valley-based startup focused on revolutionizing the supply chain and logistics industry
through unique, cost-effective data collection and
analysis. Matt has an extensive background as a product
and marketing leader focused on value creation at the
intersection of the physical and digital worlds - solving
complex problems through data collection and cloudbased analysis. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering
from University of Texas at Austin and an M.B.A. from
Harvard Business School.

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 3 Supply Chain World

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Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3

Contents
Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3 - Cover1
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Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3 - Cover3
Supply Chain World - Volume 7, Issue 3 - Cover4
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