60 seconds with John Hill, St. Onge

John M. Hill
St. Onge
Title: Director, St. Onge  
Location: San Francisco Bay area, California
Experience: 40 years experience in warehousing, distribution and technology
Primary Focus: Supply chain technology and execution systems development
Editor’s note: In October, John Hill was presented the Alan Gilligan Award in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the materials handling industry at the Material Handling Education Foundation annual meeting in San Diego. Established in 2012 by the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) and MHI, the Gilligan Award honors a member of the industry who has made outstanding contributions to the development of automatic identification and data communications (AIDC) standards and applications in materials handling and logistics in the supply chain.

Modern: First, congratulations on this award. I understand this was particularly meaningful to you.
Hill: The award is given to people who have contributed to standards in the world of automatic identification, and I was fortunate enough to be involved in the industry back during its inception. I was floored, because I had no idea I was going to receive this. Having my name associated with an industry that meant so much to me over the years was pretty fantastic.

Modern: You were involved in bar code scanning in the early days of the industry. Tell us a little about those days.
Hill: The roots of my career are in the automatic identification industry. I went to work for Dave Collins, the founder of Computer Identics, more than 40 years ago. Computer Identics was the very first commercial automatic identification company whose product line was based entirely on bar codes. Back then, we got things off the ground with the first installation of a laser scanner in a Buick plant in the fall of 1971. The system was used to identify car axles on the assembly line.

Modern: You were also involved in the creation of AIM, the industry association.
Hill: Winning the Gilligan Award conjured up the memory of sitting in a room back in 1971 with Dave and Harvey White, who was the founder of Identicon, our arch competitor at the time and one of the other founders of this industry. At the time, the market for bar code scanning was under $1 million a year, and we were all trying to grow it. Harvey and Dave thought there must be some way to collaborate in a legal fashion to generate more visibility for scanning in the marketplace. I was delegated to work with Harvey and Dave to identify a trade association or professional organization that could give us a home. We finally made a contact in 1972 with the Material Handling Institute, which was the precursor of MHI, and it offered to sponsor a mini trade group under the MHI umbrella. That trade group was the Automatic Identification Manufacturers, which is AIM today.

Modern: Fast forward 40-odd years. How has the industry evolved?
Hill: I recently sat through a presentation by Cisco on its vision for a mobile, always-connected supply chain: It was déjà vu all over again. Much of what Cisco is talking about derives from what we dreamed about 40 years ago. That was an interconnected system that captured information from a variety of sources across the supply chain. What’s evolved is the glue that enables and permits that kind of collaboration, and that’s today’s supply chain software systems.

Modern: Are today’s problems any different than yesterday’s problems?
Hill:  Not really. In the 1970s, we were trying to close the gap between the occurrence of an event and the capture of information of that event in a format that was useful to decision makers. In the warehouse, for instance, we were identifying which dock a package should be sorted to. What we learned back then, and is true today, is that the bar code wasn’t enough. We needed systems so that we could share information beyond the point where it’s captured. That’s the Holy Grail of supply chain visibility, and it continues to elude many companies today. We have so many more tools than we had back in the 1970s, but only a few companies have really mastered collaborative data exchange in a manner that would make that dream of mine finally come true.