Innovation at 4 AM

My mother has a saying: Nothing good happens after midnight.

Kevin Gue would disagree: He says that sometimes innovation happens at 4 AM.

Gue is an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at Auburn University. For the past few years, he has been working with Russell Meller, a professor of industrial engineering and director of the Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution at the University of Arkansas, on non-traditional aisle designs for warehouses. You can read about Gue’s and Meller’s research in this story from MMH.

What interests me is how that research got started. Gue says it began at 4 AM during a restless night. “I woke up with this graphic picture in my mind of a traditional warehouse with racks and a straight cross-aisle across the middle,” Gue recalls. “The questions I asked was: Why does the aisle in the center have to be straight? Why couldn’t it be V-shaped? This led to my thinking about why the picking aisles have to be oriented in the same direction as in a traditional space.”

Eventually, Gue shared his questions with Meller. They came up with the Fishbone design, with picking aisles that meet the cross aisles at 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees. Research into the advantages of the design got underway at both universities.

But, that 4 AM insight is leading to more than just a new design for warehouse aisles. “The simple insight that the aisles in a warehouse need not be north, south, east and west has to potential to change one of the fundamental assumptions of the design of warehouse spaces,” says Gue. “Think about all of the academic work on order picking, routing workers, and order batching. It’s all based on a traditional structure. Now, we have a new starting point to ask: Why do we build warehouses the way we do.”

Some of those questions may be answered now that Generac Power Systems has implemented the design in a distribution center in Whitewater, Wisconsin. “They saw an article in Modern Materials Handling and very courageously went forward with the design,” says Gue. He and Meller hope to see other implementations soon.

More importantly, he hopes that other researchers and supply chain professionals will have 4 AM moments that lead to improvements in the way we do business. “Simply stated, we want to change best practices,” says Gue. “There are many warehouse settings that I believe could be designed in ways like this had there been alternative designs when the warehouses were built. In the future, when people sit down to design a warehouse space, I’d like them to really think what the aisles should look like.”