Zebra charts a new course from data to insights

Most of us think of Zebra Technologies as a hardware company, with the leading position in the Automatic Data Capture industry that includes barcode scanners, printers, mobile computers, voice systems and RFID. Frankly, it’s not even close: Modern’s 2020 listing of the Top 20 ADC suppliers had Zebra at $2.6 billion; Honeywell, it’s nearest competitor, clocked in at at $798 million. That’s a lot of scanners and printers.

That view might be short-sighted. In fact, it appears that Zebra is in the midst of a transformation from data to insights in its offerings. My own view began to change in the spring of 2019, when I moderated a panel discussion at a conference put on by Heartland, a Zebra reseller. While a lot of the exhibitors were displaying their latest hardware, the panelist from Zebra talked about something I came to call a work execution system, or WES 2.0.

While it shares the same alphabet as a warehouse execution system, or WES, this is a new generation of warehouse software that brings to the conventional warehouse the constraint-based planning and execution associated with a WES in an automated warehouse.

Conventional warehouses still rely on people driving lift trucks and pushing carts – people outfitted with mobile computers and voice recognition systems or barcode scanners. The idea with this new category is to put decision-making capabilities at the edge where the work occurs to enable the optimization of people and work. Zebra trademarked the term FulfillmentEdge for its solution. Sure, this still requires the hardware Zebra is known for, but the secret sauce that makes associates more efficient and productive is edge computing, software and analytics. Hardware is just a means to the end.

Since then, Zebra has made a number of acquisitions that strengthen its digital chops beyond data collection.

In 2019, it launched Zebra Prescriptive Analytics following the acquisition of Profitect, a provider of prescriptive analytics for retail and CPG companies.

In 2020, the company acquired Reflexis Systems, a provider of task management, labor planning and time and attendance software.

This past August, Zebra made the leap into warehouse and factory automation when it acquired Fetch Robotics, a provider of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Yes, it’s hardware, but Fetch’s robots rely on AI, Machine Learning and analytics to optimize work on the floor.

At the end of August, Zebra announced the acquisition of Antuit.ai, a provider of AI and Machine Learning-enabled inventory management and allocation solutions specific to specific to forecasting and merchandising for the retail and CPG industries.

Clearly, Zebra’s been busy during the pandemic.

It is an eclectic portfolio of solutions. But, if you think about them, they share at least two things in common. First, they complement Zebra’s core offerings – after all, you need to collect data before those other solutions, including Fetch’s robots, can do what they do. The other is that they move Zebra deeper into analysis, insight and execution. And with robotics, they move deeper into automation. I can see Zebra making the case that all of these tools leverage the investments their existing customers have already made in data collection and mobile computing.

OK, that’s a long wind-up. To understand Zebra vision, I spoke to Tom Bianculli, the company’s chief technology officer. Bianculli made a number of points to explain the acquisitions.

They are the culmination of a vision outlined in 2015: That’s the year Zebra acquired Motorola. “The vision was that every capital asset and every worker on the edge would be connected and optimized,” Bianculli said. When you think “on the edge,” think the point at where the work gets done. The Motorola acquisition was largely about hardware. Up to that point, Zebra was best known as a printer company, while Motorola’s mobile computers, barcode scanners and voice technology were ubiquitous in distribution centers. Perhaps the biggest gamble was Zebra’s investment in the Android operating system in an otherwise Microsoft world. Today, Android is the operating system of choice “but in 2015, that wasn’t clear,” Bianculli noted. “Customers thought of Android as a consumer-based operating system.” It’s a bet that paid off. The other big change was also hardware based, which was the move from laser-based scanning to camera-based imaging.

The world has changed: Omni-channel distribution is turning every node in the retail network into a distribution network. Orders are still filled from DC’s, but they’re also drop-shipped from partners/suppliers, filled by 3PL’s in select areas and from retail stores. They’re shipped to our homes, our places of business, to lockers or other partners (think of FedEx shipping your order to Walgreens because you’re out of town) or picked up curbside. The result, says Bianculli, is that the supply chain is no longer a chain with linear connections, it’s a mesh. “We no longer talk about omni-channel,” he said. “We talk about missions and moments. Consumers have moments that they want something, or they go on a mission to get something done.”

Hardware, even good hardware, will only get you so far: Hardware alone doesn’t fully deliver the optimization that retailers, e-tailers and distributors are looking for to satisfy the outcome of those missions in a timely and cost-effective manner, especially in a very dynamic environment. “A device,” he said, “isn’t coaching you or making you better or more collaborative.” The goal, he added, is to deploy technology that can “orchestrate the dance between the human workflow and automation,” and also deliver a “layer of intelligence – contextual intelligence - about what’s happening with a finer layer of granularity. We want to understand not just the location, but the movement of the worker, and what products does this worker pick better than that worker.”

The same goes for inventory: The combination of work execution software and robotics gets at that dance between people and automation (who says technology isn’t poetic?); the Antuit.ai acquisition is focused on bringing AI and Machine Learning, plus data from sources such as weather reports, upcoming promotions and Nielsen data to provide better answers related to inventory allocation.

Dynamic planning: Perhaps the last piece – and I’m sure I’m leaving something out – is the ability to create real-time, dynamic plans, or “streaming plans,” said Bianculli. “We think planning and execution systems are going to blur together, whether that’s a labor plan, inventory plan or merchandising plan. The old way of planning, executing the plan, re-planning and re-executing is going away because of the on-demand economy,” he said. “Our idea is that you create a streaming plan by analyzing the data we collect at the edge from the tools in workers hands, and then push the right actions out to the right people in real time.”

The last question I asked Bianculli is how Zebra will take this strategy to market. Traditionally, the company has sold its hardware through a network of resellers. They’re very good at selling, implementing and servicing that hardware. These are more complex solutions, and from a software standpoint, they’re offered ina Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, model. “For now the SaaS products will be a direct sale by Zebra,” he said. “But, our goal is to channel-enable many of these solutions. To do that we have to build tools for rapid deployment.” He added that Zebra is working with the large systems integrators and consulting firms, such as Accenture and Deloitte. “That’s a new channel for us,” he said.