Warehouse Automation Rollout That Works: Align Teams, Focus on Workflows, Skip the Feature Trap

Alrighty, gang. Let's get going here. Good morning, everybody. Josh Kavenko here, chief marketing officer at Vecna Robotics. And welcome to the first episode of Robot versus Wild. And, our new series really just focuses on once you've deployed this technology, any kind of automation technology, sort of, then what happens? How do you contemplate getting to scale and and repeating success? I'm joined by my new trustee pal. I have I had an old trustee pal, and he's off chasing robots in the Amazon, as we discussed last week on our LinkedIn live preview. I have a new trustee pal. In fact, I'm gonna have new trustee pals all year. But my most important trustee pal for today is the one and only Mick Clark from, our industry solutions team. Mick, welcome to Robot versus Law. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Awesome. You some of you who followed our Mythbusters series last year would remember a, brief interlude with Mick, from Las Vegas. Mick and I had a little bit of Myth Mythbusters fun together in Las Vegas at PackX, so he's proudly joined us this year to to help, steer the ship. And unbeknownst to me, he may even do a musical number. I don't know. Guitar, he may play piano. I don't know if he's got a harpsichord or something back there. Nick, you know, when when the moment strikes you, feel free to to break out into. Alright? I'll jump in. I tend to do that. Alright. Good. But that's not on the script. Before we get going here, we'll get started right away. A little housekeeping as usual. All of these for the last few years are recorded and posted to our website. We're joined by Clinton Hudson who manages all of our technology here. To keep us on time. We'll we'll end this recording at, the half hour. No problem. If you have any questions, use the q and a panel. Excuse me. I misspoke before. The q and a panel should be on the upper left. If have any questions, I'll monitor that. Please excuse my head moving from right to left. I've got multiple screens here, so I'm just trying to steer the ship. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not on my phone. I'm not playing, Roblox or anything on the side, so don't worry about that. So let's get going. Our first edition of robot versus wild, how to survive in the wild is the name of today's edition. Hey. I just changed the slide. Can you see it just by way of, technical? Yes. Yes. Okay. So let's get going. We shared this last year. I just wanted to tee up a concept here. What are we talking about for the whole year, last Friday of every month? Well, here's the narrative, and, as I see it. We believe at Beckman Robotics that there's, you know, a whole host of opportunity to automate, your warehouse, your distribution facility, your or even your factory for that matter. But we believe there's technology that's ready today, accessible today. And notwithstanding what some of you may have seen at MODEX or here in the press, there are certainly technologies that are available for sale, but some of them really to get to maturity are a little bit ways away. We believe that what we offer today in a very self serving way, of course, ground to ground, horizontal, moves is really the sweet spot of what's available today. And then certainly some exciting technologies, case picking in high reach, definitely on the horizon, very narrow aisles as well. And then trailer loading, bulk stacking, a little bit further away to maturity. And then as I mentioned, we're all excited about humanoids. It's really in the in the news today. But is that maturity? Is it something you can depend on, deploy at scale in your facility? We believe that's a little bit, of a ways out. It's certainly exciting technology, coming down the down the pipe. The current state of automation adoption in the warehouse, you know, we rely on on a on a host of analysts that cover this market and certainly no none none more than our friends at Gartner. This is what they're seeing out in the market today. This is some recent research from them. Who's deployed intro logistics automation? And, so thirteen percent fully deployed, thirty percent first deployment, and thirty one percent beginning implementation. So that's what they're seeing in the market. There's different perspectives there depending on what technology you're thinking about, but that's sort of the grounding, if you will. And our thoughts, what Mick and I are gonna cover today is, okay, you've got that thirteen plus thirty, forty three plus another thirty one. Right? Seventy four percent, or seventy three percent, if you will. Seventy three, seventy four percent, if you will. They've deployed or in the midst of deploying, now what? Right? What what is that next frontier? Where do you contemplate the next step, with your automation program? And that's really where we are. And I have a little video here that some of you may be familiar with that I think will drive that point home. So I'll play it for you right now. Three, two, one. We are officially open for business. Facing a virtual reality? UPS can help you plan for it, manage it, and deal with it. We deliver more eshipments than anyone. U p Alright. So I didn't mean to play UPS commercial. In fact, originally, when I was looking for it, I thought it was an IBM commercial. But I actually, what we're talking about here. Right? How do you plan for success? You've got a model of success with your automation program. You're you've experimented maybe in a few places, and you're seeing that success. Certainly, I hope you're a Fekna customer who's seeing some success. Then what? And that's really the main thrust of what we'd like to cover in this series. And then, and then I think before we get going and we hand it off to Nick, there are there there there is sort of an understanding of what some of the pitfalls are when it comes to scaling automation. And this is sort of a cross section of different, assessments of that. Some of it is internal, but some of it is is third party, research as well. And I'd like to share with you our perspective on that here, in terms of the pitfalls to scaling automation. So poor requirements definition, and self evaluation of existing IT infrastructure. And we've talked a little bit about this last year in terms of, wireless infrastructure. So you can check out our episode, there from our Mythbusters, series. Underestimating the need for solution flexibility and integratability. Overlooking support factors when choosing a solution, we certainly see that. We have some competitor competitors out there that are like, okay. Just choose your solution. You know, we'll we'll, we'll we'll do a quick popping and within two hours, we'll have robots working. Right? Well, even if that was true, which I highly doubt that could happen properly, what are the what are the support elements behind what what they've deployed and and can stand the test of time. Underestimating the impact of the changing scope of a project and also cultural factors within your facility or multiple facilities. And what we mean by that is how your people will adapt to to the automation. A weak goal alignment, I don't want us to, to spoil mixed thunder here. He's got a lot to say about goal alignment. So, that certainly can derail, scaling automation and then failure to forecast changing warehouse landscape over time. Right? So how are your warehousing needs gonna change over time and the automation that you deploy? Is it flexible enough to be able to accommodate those changing needs? Those can be seasonal, but those can also be sort of structural, whether it's supply trucks or just for changing the needs of your business over time. So there we go. That's my setup here. That's what really is the the burn my saddle, if you will, that's prompting our series for this year. And with that, Nick, welcome to the show here. We were gonna we're gonna focus, and your intent today was to focus on how to survive and thrive in the wild with your automation program. So I'll hand it to you. Let's get it going. Great. Great. Yeah. So appreciate you having me. Again, this is a topic that is very near to me being on both the post sale and presale world. It's something that we talk about a lot. And a lot of these are gonna have overlap. You know, we're gonna see crossovers and callbacks as we go through this. So I'll provide some of those callbacks, but you'll see them common sense wise as well as we go through this. The first thing I wanted to talk about was effective organizational alignment. This has to do with communication avenues between not just, you know, your sites, your corporate team, the labor on those sites, but also the vendor, your partners with three p l's and things like that. Really importantly, you look at these questions on the right side of this slide. Operation alignment. You know, are the needs the same between these different levels in the organization? Does the corporate team have a goal that aligns with the three p l, that aligns with the site management, that aligns with the labor on-site, making their lives easier and things like that. A lot of times, you'll see kind of a disconnect there, and you need to remove that disconnect to have effective scaling of a initial system within that site. Then you look at scope alignment. You know? When you look at the goals, how do you reach those goals? You have a scope. Within that scope, maybe corporate has a different idea of how the operation runs on a specific site or on multiple sites. And maybe that's not actually what it is in reality. Or maybe site one has a different operation than site two, and they're considering the ability to scale to site number two, and they don't have the right environment for that system. They don't have the right personnel to be able to run that system. So another key piece is making sure that your scope is aligned throughout all these levels with your automation partner. Values. This is something I'm gonna talk in a lot of detail on in a different slide here, but your KPIs. This is that success. How do you define that success and making sure that the definition of success, it may not be the same at every level, but they need to, I'll say, be symbiotic in in their nature, there. Then we look at intersite and intersite. So is this something that you're scaling at a single site to different functionalities or different sizes within that site? Are you looking at, you know, from site one to site two to site three across your whole network? Each of these types of questions affects your strategy and how you scale. It affects the different variables that you need to look at and the different strategies that you need to put in place to be able to effectively scale whether it's in that same site or if it's in multiple sites as well. Now when you talk about sites, you can't get away from talking about labor. Now labor is a very finicky topic whenever you talk about automation, but it's really important that you break down the wall between management and labor, at a site to be able to get their feedback on how these can be used, how these automation systems can be utilized within the facility, how it can make their lives easier, how it affects their day to day, because labor can make or break a system. Their interaction with an automated system can decide between a successful deployment and an unsuccessful deployment, and in turn, the scalability of that system as well. So really breaking down these walls in between corporate, the site management, and the labor is extremely important here. And then you see along the right side, integrators, three p l's, your automation partners. They need to be involved at every level, here. It's a web of communication that you need to have to effectively scale these systems. Because if the automation partner is just talking to the corporate team, they may be missing opportunities to improve the system at the site level or at the labor level. So you need to have these multiple, I'll say, tendrils reaching out these different levels of communication in a corporate structure here. Yeah. Very important people. So, Nick, this is not a, a recommended org chart or organization structure that you're suggesting for people here. This is sort of just a a representation of different, catalysts or factors involved in an automation system, and how they interplay with with each other. And we're, also not suggesting that that, the first project has to have all of this buttoned up. But when you're looking around the corner, when you're trying to survive and thrive in the wild and scaling a a program, these things really need to be mastered. Right? And you need to nip them in the bud early. Exactly. You need to open those channels of communication. If you have everything walled off at different levels and you don't have effective communication at every level, you're setting yourself up for failure. Setting yourself up to some of those pitfalls that you touched on in in the slide before this. Right. And I think the next treatment here, I'm gonna explain a little bit more about why it's important. It's it's, it's, just an idea that we had around how we can how you can think about organizing projects, for success. So, and what we see moreover, what we see amongst our best customers is they're thinking about it this way. Not all of them. Okay? Let me just be clear. We're not we don't force fit folks to think the way we do. We're just like, hey. Some of our customers, when they're really successful, they don't think about sites or they're not thinking about major projects or wholesale automation. They're thinking about work. Right? They think about the work. And some of them think about the work in very particular ways. Here in the green, we've got different types of work, ground to ground types of workflows, end of file put away, a loading dock that I need to automate, and and maybe some lifted loads, right, of different heights and different, different requirements there. And so what our argument is here or rather a sort of an anonymized case study here is that, successful projects are ones that establish some guidelines or some objectives at first. Right? In this case, maybe you have a throughput goal or you have a labor retention objective you're trying to hit or you just, you know, are are experimenting here and trying to explore new automation opportunities, and you're using automation to help you find additional opportunities. Those start to grow maybe, by a workflow, one workflow at a time, so you choose one. And then perhaps I would suggest that instead of saying, oh, well, let's try to automate other things at this warehouse, which is easy, and we get it all the time. Right, Mick? What else can we automate at this warehouse? We're seeing customers who come to us and say, this is looking great. I've got four other sites. Let's bring those folks in, and let's replicate success what we've had here across three or four or five other sites. And that's an easy path to to to scale. Go ahead. Yeah. I think common sense tells a lot of people when you implement a single workflow in a facility that your next step should be to automate more within that facility. Yep. But it's counterintuitive, and I'm not saying that fits every single organization. But, a healthy way to look at that is if you have had a successful deployment in that site doing a specific workflow and you have another workflow that you're looking at in that site, instead, you can look at another site that does the exact same thing, and you have set yourself up for success in a much more effective way. And, again, I think it's a healthy way to look at scaling your system from a workflow perspective versus just looking at we're gonna go site by site meticulously, trying to automate every single piece of this site. You're squandering the success of that original deployment, or you're at least delaying that future success of other sites, by approaching it that way. So it's a it's a key point. A few nuggets here, actually. The more I I look at this, the more I'm the more the juices flow here. Right? So the second piece is, like, a successful scaling operation in the wild needs a champion. Right? You can't have all these tendrils sort of off on their own, and hopefully, they they synchronize on their own. Right? I guess they could. Right? But if you're going to thrive, not just survive, but thrive in the wild, if you will, it's useful to have a champion. Does a champion have to be at headquarters? No. Doesn't have to be at headquarters. Useful, but but we have customer that's not the case. It could be a site champion who's sort of leading an automation initiative, but it's useful to have a champion for that for that load or that type type of work. I think also, let's not lose sight of the fact that that we're we're suggesting that you think about automating individual work, and and chopping it into pieces, manageable pieces, and maybe not thinking about end to end automation from dock, you know, all the way to sort of loading in a in a rack. Right? And then back. Right? Those are useful, but I I think we're on the horizon where there's technology that can do that, but I don't think we're there. Our position is that you're not we're not there. You're not gonna find one robot to do everything end to end. So I think for today, we're talking very practically for today. What you can buy and deploy reliably today is really all about this, thinking about individual workflows that you can tackle, and automate right now. And I think that's what we're suggesting here. Okay. Let's move on here, Mick. I think your next next point is about data. Yeah. Yeah. So, again, like I said, a lot of overlap here when you talk about goal alignment and the communication. Communication is gonna play a role in everything. But really importantly about how you utilize data, how you communicate data between those different levels. So if you have a deployment of an automated system within your facility, how are you measuring that success? It can't all be qualitative. You need to have quantitative points, to be able to showcase that success to other sites, to showcase that success to the corporate team, to different parties, within your organization to be able to kind of do some of that internal selling to be able to say this will be successful in other places for these reasons. So being able to work with your vendor on having, I'll say, a regular cadence to go through the data coming out of the system, to explain where that data is coming from, to make sure that it is the right data to have that you need for your KPIs is something that lends itself completely to the success of the system. If you don't have that available, if you're not communicating it effectively, it becomes very difficult to justify moving on to larger systems, moving on to different sites, because you simply don't know if you don't have the data. You simply don't know your success levels and what you can reach if you don't have that data. So really important to open those avenues of communication and to work with your vendor as a partnership, you know, like we do with all our customers to make sure that the data is being understood correctly, that's being communicated correctly, and that it's actionable data. Really, really, again, key pieces of that communication, specifically. And, ultimately, the like, reports like this in the data is that's currency with with your vendor. That's currency of your vendor with your customer. Really, that's what binds you together. Right? And determines how how you're gonna scale if you're gonna scale. Right? It's really important part. Alright. So we've talked about org, critical for success. Data, that's the currency. But, you know, where the rubber hits the road, the robot's gotta roll. Yep. Yep. And the number one way to increase your utilization of a automated system is to improve your adoption, to improve the culture around those robots, those AMRs, those AGVs in your facility. And there's a number of ways to do that. There's training. You want to have ongoing training to make sure that people feel comfortable around the machines that they, not just from a safety perspective, but from a utilization perspective. Do they know how to use it? Do they know how to react when there is an issue? And things like that. So, ongoing training is really important. Developing resources around the system, that can be training documentation, it can be something as simple as putting up signage around your facility that shows pictures of the vehicles or of those robots, videos that you show to guests as they come in, just ingraining the system in your culture. So it's not an intrusion on your operation, it is a part of your operation. Too many times I see that, attitude that it's a separate thing. It's like we're trying to shoehorn this into our facility. That is not the way it should be approached. This is a partnership and this is a piece of your business that you need to approach the same way you do any other part of your operation. That also has to do with the continuous improvement plan, working with the vendor to decide, you know, hey, maybe there's this piece that's not working as well as we expect it to. How do we move towards, you know, that KPI that we need to reach? That can be done in a myriad of different ways, whether it's through having, you know, guarantees with your vendor, asking more of your vendor, or the vendor asking of you to adjust your operation. When your vendor is telling you something will help the system work better, it's important to listen to that because they've dealt with hundreds of these deployments where you, with their technology, have dealt with probably one at that point in time. So it's really important that there's that back and forth, to get that continuous improvement. All that goes with expecting more of your automation vendor. This should be a partnership. This should not be dropping a robot off in your facility and saying, good luck with that. I hope you figure that out. For us, we look at that as a very, ineffective way of scaling the systems, and it's setting yourself up for failure. And then that also has to do with support infrastructure. This is something that I harp on constantly. Effective support structure is the number one reason that these systems succeed, and it's ineffective support is the number one reason they fail. When you talk about AGV AMR systems, it's not usually a failure of the technology that causes people to stop using them. It is a small issue that snowballs into bigger and bigger issues because it wasn't effectively supported, And then your optics of the system with your operators, takes a nosedive because they say, oh, I keep having to follow this robot around and reset it, or, oh, I keep having to deal with this alarm code. I don't like these machines. I'm not gonna use them. And then all of a sudden, that goes up through the through the ranks to management to corporate of the system doesn't work well. And all of that from a small issue that could probably be fixed by just having an effective support infrastructure in place. Often overlooked in your initial assessment of technology, but extremely important as you scale. Extremely important. Something to harp on presale and post sale to make sure that partnership's intact. Right. And when you have a vendor that has a command center, makes it, that watches all these robots when you're sleeping and when you're awake, definitely helps. And so I think you already hit that this. This is an article that just came out recently. Everybody in the in the industry saw it. It was it was a, a piece in the journal. And, I guess it answered the question, do you need a robot wrangler? Mick, do you need a robot wrangler? No. You should not need a robot wrangler. The whole point of these systems is that your workers can be focused on the work that they do best and that our system can take care of the dirty, dull, dangerous, the three d's that everyone would say in robotics. Once you start having people chase the robots down one hundred and fifty times a day, that becomes their job, and then you lose a lot of that ROI and a lot of effectiveness that you see, or that you were promised. Kinda defeats the purpose of having robots to begin with. So let's move on here. I guess the fourth item. Right? We talked about work data, talked about adoption. This is one that we run into certainly before an engagement, but also as the engagement matures. Folks, you know, sites get ambitious with what they want the robot to do, and that could be a little bit of a pitfall. So let's walk through this. And I I hinted at this on LinkedIn on our LinkedIn channel a little bit. We've used this before, but it's worth just mentioning again this idea of feature it is. Check out the Starbucks order, Vic. Is this yours? Yeah. That's fine. That's my favorite drink right there. Okay. Takes about two hours to make. It's great. It's got forty thousand calories. No need to eat for a week after that. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this this actually goes back to that slide we showed with the workflow orientation compared to site by site orientation because what I see a lot of times is you implement a system and then you say, wow. This system works great and what it's trying to do, but man, I wish you could do this. I wish that you could make these robots fly. That would really help us in this other application, and we're not gonna scale until you can do that. All that does is you're delaying the sec success of the system. Who knows how long that's gonna take till you get that feature, whereas you have a direct view on success of the functionality that you currently have. So sitting on your hands and waiting for these features to come out one after another is not a good partnership, and it's not an effective way to scale the system because you'll just be waiting. You're gonna sit there, and you're gonna have opportunity costs of things you could be automating elsewhere. And instead, you're waiting on what you consider a super high value, automation that could be five years down the road, could be ten years down the road depending on some other variable. So, it's definitely something that we see really commonly. And, again, this kind of fall into those pitfalls of just waiting and waiting and waiting until the perfect solution arrives. It's not gonna arrive for you. It's just realistically not a not a possibility. Let let me let me, counter that by saying it could arrive, and someone could probably be out there building it for you custom once. But then you get into this custom trap, which isn't where really where we are. I don't think that's where the market's going. Right? Yeah. Rising tide raises all ships around standardizing, your cloud enabled automation program. And, and we see time and time again that the eyes get focused on on shiny outputs, whether that's micro features or or larger end to end capabilities when there's tons of low hanging fruit around to be automated around any facility. Right? So if you can just take your eye off that prize, maybe that prize is coming next year in in the form of, some sort of workflow automation or some sort of capability that you need. But today, tons of of, automation, low hanging fruit, which is waiting to be, to be discussed. So with that, let's wrap it up here. We're getting to the the half hour. I've updated this one. We've we've looked at this before. We've looked at this all year last year. The best brands out there so this is just to reset everybody. This is the profitability of an individual company over a period of years versus the industry at large graph from, I pulled this from NYU Stern School of Business. And the the point here is that every one of these industry leaders, lead their industry in terms of profitability. They also happen to be, major adopters of automation in warehousing and distribution. Okay? Correlation is correlation. They're profitable because they automate and they automate well. So kudos, to them. And that could be you. And so what are some of the common characteristics just by way of takeaways? They have c level support. They think of the big picture. They avoid the FUD that can or the fear, uncertainty, and debt that can can hover around these projects because of some because of miscommunication. Right? Mick. And also a lack of data. They don't they don't do POCs. I won't get into that today. We've talked about this ad nauseam last year in our series last year. We don't believe in POCs. Production pilots were fine, but POCs don't really give you the bang for the buck that you think they do. They focus on long term success. You know, short termism is really automation's worst enemy, I would say, and maybe we'll talk about that in a future episode. And then change management is really a key to the long term success of surviving and thriving in the wild and time and again. Our best customers, are are long term thinkers and they also are masters of change management. Okay. With that, how do you get started? If you're interested in what we're talking about, you wanna dive right in, and you wanna survive and thrive in the wild automation wild, well, it it really is, an easy, journey that we've established here. We've talked about this, before. And it really starts with validating our that our tune workflows can match your target environments. We'll run a quick ROI for you, basic ROI, and we'll build the scope of work, for initial installation and and and validation for you. So that's where we are. That's how you get started with Feckna Robotics, and we're we're thrilled to have your business. If you're interested in this type of content, we've got, a whole resource hub on our website. Please visit it. You can download all of our recordings and listen to previous episodes. I think we've got twenty, twenty five episodes of these webinars, in, in the past loaded up our website. And then our team our crack team does some great work on LinkedIn sharing only vital information. They don't fool around there, and we promote all of our upcoming activities as well. So please follow us on LinkedIn. So with that, on behalf first of all, Nick, thanks a ton. Great job. Thank you. Thank you. And on behalf of Clint, Nick, and everybody else on the team at the team, at Beckman Robotics, I just wanna thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next month for episode two of Robot versus Wild. Have a great weekend, everybody. Happy holiday.