Imprisoned in silos

I just interviewed Leon McGinnis, a professor of manufacturing systems at Georgia Tech. I figured he’d be just the right person to talk about the future of materials handling for our September special issue on that topic. What he told me tells me this field has a lot of work to do.

He’s been waging a campaign to try to get the various material handling engineering disciplines to talk to each other using a standard engineering language. You mean they don’t, I asked? Apparently not. Not like all the disparate disciplines that contribute to the making of an integrated circuit.

“With an integrated circuit, whether you’re a transistor guy, a capacitor guy or a resister guy, you all draw the same schematic,” he told me. “With this schematic you have access to a bunch of tools that will do analysis for you and tell you how this thing’s working.”

In materials handling, he continued, we hire simulation experts who spend six weeks building a model. A new model gets reinvented with each project. The problem is, AGV people don’t speak the same language as AS/RS and robotics people. Time and money go out the window as a result of reinventing the wheel.

This sorry saga of specialty silos reminded me of a study AMR Research released a few months ago, in conjunction with a subgroup of the Supply Chain Council. They surveyed almost 200 organizations and learned that no two supply chains are alike. In fact, very few companies define the supply chain in the same way. The researchers concluded that this contributes significantly to a lack of clear priorities for standards and for consistent curriculum development at universities.

That’s a problem, considering there’s a trend toward a more centralized supply chain structure that demands managers have broader skillsets.  Industries and academia need to adopt a shared, modern, comprehensive model that incorporates the growing depth and scope of the materials handling and logistics disciplines.

Clearly schools and employers need to collaborate as much as AGV and AS/RS specialists do. Schools need to provide more universal supply chain management skillsets while industry needs to offer internship opportunities for students to gain real-world exposure to how these technologies contribute to global supply chain flow.

Is your company part of the solution or part of the problem? Do you keep going back to the drawing board with each new project? Are you concerned about the talent pool available to manage your projects? Does your company open its doors to student interns? And if it does, have you hired them later? Give me your take on the future of materials handling and logistics at your company.