DC Velocity - April 2019

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— Robotic Small Package Singulation (SPS)

Creating order from chaos Traditionally, inducting packages or items to a sortation system has been a manual operation. It’s dull, repetitive and hard to find people to do it. That is now changing. ABB, together with a leading perception company, has developed a robot-centric solution that accurately and consistently identifies each package, picking and placing it on the induction conveyor, every hour of every day. Creating order from chaos one package at a time. It is just one of the new robotic solutions for the warehousing, distribution and order fulfillment market from ABB. www.abb.com/robotics

26 DC VELOCITY APRIL 2019 www.dcvelocity.com
got. We’ve got to think more about
putting together teams or clusters
focused on different [customer]
segments and populate those teams
with people who have the subcul-
tures we need so that the cost-driven
people can look after the lean supply
chains, the agile ones can look after
the high-speed supply chains, and
so on.
And then, you need different
processes for the different types of
supply chains. You need different
combinations of technology. It’s the
same with training and develop-
ment. The sort of training and devel-
opment you’d do for a lean supply chain
team, where you’re looking at analytics
and things like that, are different from the
training and development you might do
for a project-based supply chain.

All of these things are well known; it’s more about developing recipes. How do you mix and match these variables? It’s about really looking at the marketplace and trying to use it as the frame of reference to come back inside the business and start more precisely orienting our fixed and limited resources in a much more clever way.

QThis seems to tie into the subtitle of your upcoming book, “Reinvent your
enterprise from the outside-in”?

A Yes, I just began to touch upon that— 99.9 percent of supply chains that exist today grew up out of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Their major thrust was to just keep up with growth because there was a lot of growth around. Then in the ’70s and ’80s, we started to run into volatility, whether it was the oil crisis in ’73, terrorism, or technological change. What’s become clear is that we can no longer design our supply chains from the “inside out,” where we just take a bit of a guess at what we think customers are saying and thinking, and then develop a particular configuration around that. Instead, you’ve got to get on the outside and look back at yourself. It’s almost like levitating outside the body. Look at the world and yourself through the eyes of the customer and try to understand what their expectations are. Not guessing but actually having a direct link and really getting inside the customer’s head.

There are very few companies that have been able to do this well. [The computer company] Dell did it very early on when it sold computers directly to consumers. Those companies that have had more or less direct contact with consumers automatically get it. But many, many industrial companies don’t. They deal with distributors, agents, subsidiaries, and intermediaries, and very often they don’t understand as well as they should what the end user wants.