DC Velocity - December 2013

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ty and control, he says, allowing for development of lean supply chains.

Today’s mobile technologies also broaden the communication “footprint.” Because they use cellular communication, they can send information over a wider geography than the type of wireless technology that’s been used in DCs for the past two decades.

Mark Wheeler, director of warehouse solutions for Motorola, says he is seeing wider adoption of mobile technologies in areas like the food industry. That’s partly the result of recent government mandates that demand end-to-end visibility of food moving through the supply chain, As for how that might be achieved, Bruce Stubbs, director of industry marketing for Intermec, which provides printers, mobile computers, and other tracing technologies, says smart mobile printers can be used at the point of harvest to create labels with traceability information. The bar codes on those labels are readable by data capture technologies at each step in the supply chain—transportation, processing, manufacturing, and distribution. “It’s a complete end-to-end story that covers the point of harvest to the point of sale,” he says. That tracing capability is crucially important for consumer safety, he says, but it is also critical to brand protection.

Alvarez offers a similar story, citing a Capgemini project that involves using RFID chips and other technologies to track livestock—individual animals—through their entire lives: recording how they are fed, when and where they are sold, who purchased them, and so on right up through the manufacture and packaging of final products.

End-to-end supply chain visibility and control may still be far off. The technology is still too expensive for many companies to deploy widely, says Alvarez. But a combination of factors—regulation in the food and pharmaceutical industries, for example, and the never-ending pressure to compress supply chains—are likely to drive further adoption. ;

nology in the company’s response to disasters such as major storms, when demand for building products is high but supply chains are disrupted.

As an example, he described using
GPS units to track generator ship-
ments into disaster zones. “We can
suck information in, and we have the
algorithms to tell stores when prod-
ucts will arrive. That sounds easy, but
when it comes to disasters, every-
thing is out the window.”
Kay Palmer, the Hunt CIO,
described how the use of mobile
technology has evolved at her com-
pany—from tracking tractors, to
tracking trailers, to eventually using
RFID or similar technologies to
track individual pieces of a load. The
drawback to that, she says, is cost.
Because it’s unlikely the company
will be able to recover the tags, she
says, the price of tags still must come
down before their use is practical.
But that day will come, she expects.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE WAREHOUSE

Wireless technologies are nothing new in distribution centers, of course. Wireless handhelds and similar untethered technologies have been in use for decades. What’s changing is that they are becoming more compact, more robust, more reliable, and more multifunctional.

Rob Armstrong, who leads marketing for manufacturing and logistics for Motorola in North America, says that mobile technologies had their first warehousing applications in picking, but that over time they have spread throughout operations, including receiving, putaway, replenishment, and cycle counting.