Supply chain management: Going to where the puck is going to be

If you’re a hockey fan, you probably remember when Wayne Gretzky was king of the ice. Despite being a superb skater, Gretzky never really looked the part. His success, it was said, was his knack for always being in the right position to make a play. While most hockey players skated after the puck, Gretzky skated to where the puck was going to be next.

I was thinking about Gretzky the other day during a conversation with Greg Cronin, executive vice president of Seegrid, a Pittsburgh-based manufacturer of industrial mobile robots. No, he’s not a hockey player. But throughout his career, Cronin has had a certain knack: Instead of chasing the same supply chain technology business everyone else was chasing, he was often where the supply chain technology business was going next.

In the 80’s and 90’s, he was president of McHugh Software International, now known as RedPrairie, and executive vice president of sales for Manhattan Associates when the WMS industry was just getting started. He left Manhattan to found ViewLocity when supply chain visibility and event management were still buzzwords. And in 2001, he founded TrenStar, a mobile asset management company that pioneered the use of RFID to track beer kegs for the brewery industry. These days, asset management is the fastest-growing segment of the industrial RFID market.

Around 2005, Cronin went into semi-retirement, dividing his time between consulting jobs for venture capital groups and golf. Retirement didn’t set that well with him. A couple of years ago, he came across Seegrid, a robotics company co-founded by the former Director of the Mobile Robot Lab at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. What he saw excited him. “I came out of retirement for this one,” he says, adding, “It turns out, I’m a pretty lousy golfer anyway.”

If you were at the North American materials handling show in Cleveland last spring or ProMat in January you may have seen Seegrid’s vehicles. One is a tugger that looks a little like a miniature AGV. The other is an operator-less pallet jack with 8,000 lbs. of lifting capacity.

Watching them in action, I had two questions: What’s so great about a robot given that we already have AGV’s? And, second, is Cronin once again skating to where the puck is going?

To the first question, Cronin says a mobile robot is different from an AGV in a couple of ways. The most important is the navigation system. An AGV is guided by something physical – magnetic tape on the floor or lasers reflecting off targets positioned throughout a facility. Seegrid’s vehicles rely on a computer chip, artificial intelligence software, sensors and a camera lens for navigation. The camera takes pictures that are overlaid on a grid in the software to learn its surroundings and figure out where it’s going without something physical to guide it. “An AGV reacts to the magnetic tape,” says Cronin. “A robot uses vision and its brain to recognize where its at and react to things. It uses visual guidance like a human would and develops more human-like responses.”  

A Seegrid pallet jack could be used to pick up a pallet and deliver it to a specific station, say a stretch wrapper. Of course, an AGV can do that. But in the next iteration, that same pallet jack may be sent to a picking zone where it will follow an order picker down the aisle as he picks cartons to the pallet. Done in that zone? The pallet jack will route itself to the next picker until everything has been picked from that zone and it heads to a packing or shipping area.

Cronin clearly believes he’s skated to where the puck is going. “Over the next three years, it’s going to be amazing how this whole robotics field develops,” he says. “It’s starting to happen now.”