When voice technology is just a phone call away

When it comes to voice technology in the warehouse, most of us are familiar with Voxware and Vocollect, the industry leaders.

Datria is a less common name in the supply chain. But I spoke to Doug Brown, Datria’s senior director of product management and marketing, the other day, and they have a different approach to bringing voice into the supply chain than their competitors, one that’s been embraced by Coca Cola Enterprises.

First, a little background. While most operations personnel have never heard of Datria, the company has been around since 1997, when it was spun off from Lockheed Martin. Back then, Datria developed speech recognition solutions for defense applications, primarily soldiers in the field. The new company’s mission, according to Brown, was to commercialize the technology and develop speech-enabled applications for mobile workers. “Up until last year,” Brown told me, “our applications were primarily outside the four walls for workers in the field. We had never done traditional voice picking. We saw that as something of a niche application.”

Second, when it comes to voice, Datria takes a different approach than its competitors. That’s what intrigued Coca Cola Enterprise (more on this in a moment).

As Brown explains it, most solution providers voice enable a device. In a warehouse operation, an order picker for instance, wears a voice-enabled mobile computer on their belt. The middleware software solution on the computing device communicates with a WMS or an ERP solution to get order information or update the system after tasks have been completed and inventory has been picked.

Datria, on the other hand, loads the software onto a server in the network instead. The voice solution, then, has an IP address, just like a website. Any worker inside or outside the four walls can access the solution by dialing into the IP address. That may be a ruggedized mobile computing device like a traditional voice system. Or, it code be with a PDA, a voice-over-IP telephone or even a cell phone. “Almost any device that can make a phone call can access the solution,” says Brown. By having the solution on the network, a worker isn’t limited to just working with a WMS solution. The device can work with any solution the worker can dial in to. 

That’s what intrigued Coca Cola Enterprises. “They have 75,000 employees, 35,000 of whom are mobile,” says Brown. Out of that number, however, only 5,000 are order pickers. The soft drink bottler wanted a solution they could roll out in their warehouses now and extend later to route managers, store merchandisers, truck drivers, plant maintenance workers, technicians or anyone else may benefit from having hands free access to whatever application they access for their jobs.

In the last year, Coca Cola Enterprises has rolled the solution out to their 100 largest warehouses in North America, with 2,100 pickers using off the shelf Cisco wireless phones to pick orders.

“The advantage is that I can automate any transaction that’s done in the enterprise with voice,” says Brown. “The system is just a phone call away.”