DC Velocity - March 2017

18 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2017 www.dcvelocity.com newsworthy

Honeywell International Inc. has rolled out a package-dimensioning scanner and a voice-directed mobile headset device in a continuation of the industrial giant’s push into retail and supply chain operations.

The scanner, called the “AutoCube 8200 Fixed Dimensioning System,” uses the company’s optical imaging technology to quickly calculate the

3-D measurements of a package in a parcel pickup location, Honeywell said. The AutoCube is intended to help shippers find the most cost-effective solution for so-called dimensional weight calculations used by UPS and FedEx Corp. to set rates, Honeywell said.

Under dimensional pricing, rates are determined by a parcel’s dimensions rather than its actual weight. The Honeywell tool is designed to provide more accurate measurements than traditional paper-and-pencil methods can while costing less than top-shelf warehouse dimensioners, Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions (SPS) Chief Marketing Officer Brian Hovey said in an interview.

Honeywell also unveiled a voice-directed wearable headset called the “Connected Retail Solution.” The device is designed to allow retail store employees to fulfill e-commerce orders from the floor without impeding their ability to handle tasks like price checking, inventory management, and speaking with shoppers.

Store employees wearing the headset will be able to use voice prompts to carry out multistep tasks according to directions provided by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or warehouse management system, Hovey said. The solution is similar to Honeywell’s Vocollect system for DC picking operations, but adapted to retail and customer-facing tasks, he said.

EXPANSION DRIVEN BY E-COMMERCE Morris Plains, N.J.-based Honeywell has been expanding into the supply chain management market since acquiring data-capture equipment supplier Intermec Inc. in 2012 and material handling automation specialist Intelligrated Systems Inc. in 2016. Earlier this year, Honeywell teamed up with chip giant Intel Corp. to develop Internet of Things (Io T) solutions for retail and logistics applications.

Six months into its purchase of Intelligrated, Honeywell is continuing to add hardware and software pieces to its portfolio of products designed to help retail and DC facilities handle the challenges of e-commerce, SPS CEO John Waldron said during an online press conference.

“The e-commerce boom and growing consumer expectations have put
a spotlight on operational inefficiencies and disconnects,” Waldron said,
according to a transcript of the event. “To stay competitive, businesses need
to deploy the Internet of Things, cloud solutions, and automation through-
out their supply chains.”
The new product launches and upgrades showcase the company’s
progress in folding Intelligrated’s warehouse automation solutions into
Honeywell’s catalog of rugged computers, scanners, printers, and voice-di-
rected platforms, Hovey said.

“This is anchored around the retail supply chain,” said Hovey. “It is intended to help our customers adapt to the challenges of handling e-commerce fulfillment, such as warehouse automation, processing inventory with speed and flexibility, and handling individual-item-level orders for e-commerce instead of the traditional pallet-level orders.”

—Ben Ames

Honeywell unveils e-commerce fulfillment tools
announcing plans to build an air
hub in Cincinnati, and procuring thou-
sands of truck trailers, all with the goal
of taking more control of its supply
chain. However, Satish Jindel, head of
SJ Consulting, said it would be neither
quick nor easy for Amazon to divert the
massive volumes it tenders to USPS to
its own network.

One way USPS can retain Amazon’s business over the long haul is to impose surcharges on Parcel Select deliveries to locations outside densely populated urban and suburban areas, a practice FedEx and UPS have followed for years, Jindel said. USPS imposes no delivery surcharges, thus prices are the same regardless of distance. This keeps prices artificially elevated in urban areas, while subsidizing more labor-intensive deliveries to extended locales, according to Jindel. Amazon will eventually seek delivery alternatives to Parcel Select if it gets better pricing elsewhere, he said.

HOLIDAY VOLUMES UP

USPS said it handled about 800 million parcels during its peak holiday period, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Shipping and package revenue, about half of which comes from USPS’s Priority Mail one- to three-day deliveries, rose to $5.4 billion in the fiscal quarter, from $4.7 billion. Volume rose to 1. 6 billion parcels from 1. 44 billion, USPS said.

The “Shipping and Packages” business accounted for 28 percent of USPS’s total quarterly revenue, it said. Though high by historical standards, it is still less than the 36-percent share generated by first-class mail, USPS’s most profitable product. What’s more, the shipping unit accounted for just 4 percent of total volume in the quarter.

Because the costs associated with handling parcels are greater than the expenses of moving first-class mail, USPS would need to generate $2 in shipping and package revenue to replace the contribution from each $1 of lost first-class mail revenue, it said, citing fiscal 2016 estimates.