Tom Andel

Build your own lifeboat
April 24, 2008

The NA2008 Material Handling Show is over, but its memory lingers on. Good ones too. In fact I shared a few with someone whose e-mail I found in my overloaded inbox when I logged back onto my computer. It was from someone researching the supply chain management software market. They wanted my thoughts on the market in general as well as the impact a recession might have on it.

The question was timely, because I might have ignored it without having some of the ready answers I picked up from working the show floor. Here’s how I responded:

With a struggling economy, companies naturally try to make best use of their assets, including facilities and inventory. Those are the challenges supply chain management solutions are designed to address. I just finished covering NA 2008, the Material Handling Show in Cleveland. Many of the supply chain solution providers with whom I talked are optimistic about the readiness of attendees to invest in a supply chain solution.

But it seems the best solutions this year are those that make best use of what the manager already has to work with. For example, Dematic now offers a Warehouse Control System which is an order fulfillment platform that receives orders from a customer’s WMS or ERP and uses that input to drive existing order fulfillment technology like light-, voice, or RF-directed picking.

Accu-Sort, the company that for so long was known for scanning solutions, is now all about system integration. Adnan Ahmed, the firm’s vice president of marketing, told me his company is helping customers make existing systems work together from one box. The software to do this is becoming more integrated and more important. The system hardware is also more flexible, featuring modular “pop-out” swappable components and remote maintenance and repair diagnostics.

John Ashodian, market manager for SICK, suppliers of photoelectric, safety and automatic identification solutions--whose main customer base has always been material handling OEMs--is now finding a ready market among end users. It is offering ways to integrate technologies using one software platform. One control module on a sorter, for example, can take inputs from camera systems, line scanners and scale data for truckload optimization.

Even Voxware, providers of voice-based picking solutions, got out of the hardware business to focus on software that gives end users configurable tool sets so they can customize their own warehouse solutions without writing code.

So while we may not see widespread  “Big Bang”  supply chain software projects for a while, I think supply chain managers will be working on improving what they already have using a more modular approach—one step at a time. Up to three-quarters of DC operations are still paper-based-- without a WMS--so they need to do something to improve their productivity if they’re going to ride out the rough year ahead. The Material Handling Industry is giving customers solutions that will help them build their own life boat rather than wait for a life guard to throw them a life preserver they can’t hold onto.

Posted by Tom Andel on April 24, 2008 | Comments (0)