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www.tgw-group.com
MODEX
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VISIT US AT
SMART PIECE PICKING SYSTEM by TGW
As a leading systems integrator for automated warehouse solutions, TGW has developed FlashPick® - a modular goods-to-person
piece picking system for retail, e-commerce
and omni-channel operations. At Modex TGW
will be showcasing a live demonstration of its
PickCenter One-workstation.
chain is painful. Now imagine how
difficult it will be when you have
thousands of those bad data points
being immutable.
In other words, don’t undertake a
blockchain project because you think
it will address data-quality challeng-
es. It won’t. Instead, carefully design
the points where data enters the
distributed ledger and consider how
to deal with the inevitable case of
bad data.
RUBE GOLDBERG, ANYONE?
The cartoonist Rube Goldberg was
famous for his drawings depicting
complicated gadgets performing simple
tasks in convoluted ways. For some appli-
cations, blockchain technology might
end up being a “Rube Goldberg device”
because it’s too complex of a solution for
the problem the supply chain is trying to
solve. This really has two aspects; let’s look
at the first: code stability.
Blockchains are not just distributed
ledgers but distributed apps. The same
code is running on hundreds of servers,
or “nodes,” which are storing equivalent
copies of data and talking to each other
to commit new transactions and keep
data in sync (via what’s called a consensus
mechanism). It is an amazing and intricate organism.
But that complexity makes it horribly
difficult to upgrade and maintain. Let’s say
the latest software build our development
team committed has introduced a priority-one defect that is negatively affecting
our customers’ operations so that they
can’t ship orders to their customers. What
now? In a centralized system, we would
gather the development team together,
quickly create and test a fix, and deploy it
to the production system. Done.
But how does one deploy that fix to
hundreds of nodes? In blockchain speak
that requires “consensus.” The majority
of nodes have to agree to deploy it before
the fix can become the latest version.
Anyone deploying code to a public-scale,
mission-critical system knows how hard
that is even if it is centralized.
Now imagine having to deploy an
upgrade to a blockchain system, which
would require gaining consensus from
entities outside of your control. This
sounds like a nightmare! Consider further: What if that priority-one defect only
affected 30% of all customers, while the
majority benefited (say, an error in volume discount math unfairly favors the
supplier)? Are we now stuck? Who has the
ability to fix this?
Invoking the Rube Goldberg analogy
might be a bit unfair. But in all supply
chain software I’ve ever seen, the one constant was the rate of change of the code—
developers are constantly churning out
new modules, new features and functions,
and new defect fixes. And that seems all
the more difficult in a blockchain context.
