Bob Trebilcock

Targeted automation at NA 2008

What’s the most critical issue facing the materials handling industry today?

By my way of thinking, it’s not $100+ per gallon oil. No, I think it’s the changing demographics of the country’s workforce. Many industries are talking about the worker shortage they’re going to face over the next few years. The financial planning industry, for instance, estimates it’ll be short 50,000 planners in the coming years to deal with the needs of retiring baby boomers; the accounting industry is predicting similar shortages in its profession.

Talk to people in our industry and the impact is already being felt. At NA 2008 last week, John Nofsinger, CEO of Material Handling Industry of America, told me a story about a company that recently opened a very large new distribution center. “By the time they were done hiring, they had 20 different languages being spoken in the facility,” Nofsinger said. “That was a shock to them.”

To Nofsinger, those disruptive demographics are one of the reasons the automation side of the materials handling industry is doing well now. “Had that company understood the dynamics of the workforce ahead of time, that might have impacted the technologies they chose for the DC,” Nofsinger told me. “I think technologies that deal with the disruption of workers are going to get play in the future.”

One of the trends that I noticed walking the show floor at NA was what I think of as targeted automation. Yes, the big lights-out technologies, like automated storage and retrieval, were on display. But I also saw solutions with the more modest goal of strategically applying automation to manual operations and at a reasonable cost. Here are two examples:

Konstant, a provider of high-density storage solutions, like drive-thru racking, introduced something they called the Pallet Runner. Instead of delivering a pallet load to a storage position in the drive-thru rack, the operator drops it off at a loading station, where it’s putaway or retrieved from storage by an intelligent cart running on rails. You still need a lift truck operator, but the time saved might mean you need fewer operators to move the same number of pallets.

Meanwhile, HK Systems was one of the AGV providers showing off reach truck and turret truck vehicles that can work with existing rack systems to automate putaway and picking operations. While it takes two AGVs to replace one lift truck and operator, facilities running two and three shifts can run the same AGVs on every shift.

What both solutions shared in common was a relatively inexpensive way to bring automation into a facility and alleviate the labor problems facing DCs and manufacturers today. It’s a trend I’m going to look for next January at ProMat 2009.

Posted by Bob Trebilcock on April 29, 2008 | Comments (0)