Steve 0:02

Welcome to Optech insights, where we talk operational excellence, the nerdy tech stuff that drives business makes workforces effective and keeps supply chains moving. It might not be sexy, but it's sure as hell matters. Your host is Todd Greenwald, Peloton newbie by night and supply chain tech wizard by day with guests and content from every industry. Get ready for insights that could transform your operations. It's Optech insights.

Todd 0:26

Welcome to the show. This is your host. Todd Greenwald of Optech insights. And today I'm joined by Mark Wheeler of zebra technologies. Mark. Thanks for joining me.

Mark 0:35

Thank you, Todd. It's great to be here

Todd 0:36

while I'm excited to have you here, and I'm really excited for you to share some things that you've been working on with the zebra team, Mark is the global director of supply chain solutions and he's got a lot of experience in the space from, from all different types of realms outside of even zebra in his past. he comes to the table with a lot of knowledge in the space of warehouse CCS and, and the supply chain. and that's, that's where you've shined, within, complimenting zebra technology solutions and helping customers. So this health crisis we're in, I mean, there's all these things going on. Things are moving faster than ever. And it's almost like a dizzying at times, but where do you kind of start? help us understand what zebras.

Mark 1:22

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, entered 2020 with, you know, expectations for a very interesting year. there's so much change and disruption going on before for anybody ever heard of COVID-19. And you know, part of that was driven by, you know, this continued growth in e-commerce and how that's restructuring the physical flow of goods through the economy. Right. Part of that's driven by technological innovation. You know, we've got AI and ML and coming on and everybody's trying to figure out what does that mean to my business? We've got in industrial internet of things. I'm always trying out new. What is that going to mean to my business? How do I do things smarter and better? Uh, and we've got all this innovation coming in around physical automation and robotics. And again, yeah. You

Todd 2:03

guys are doing some great things with like FACHE and some other really great.

Mark 2:07

Yeah. We're collaborating with some are some of our venture partners like fetch and locus and plus one and, there's really exciting times. And then you put the pandemic on top of that. Uh it's it's been kind of crazy,

Todd 2:19

very excited for you to share what zebra, has been doing and, and what your journey has been over the years of transforming into a, a business that's. Yes, you have technology and you, and your focus on technology, but a business that's focused on helping those supply chain and retail or types of businesses and all those folks that you guys touch every day, and evolve to get better. through, through tech, through the partnerships too, that you, that you mentioned, it's all like really exciting and it's a different type of a paradigm than we're. we've all been in the past. I'd love for you to share what zebra has been doing and what you've been, what you've been up to, on this path.

Mark 3:00

Yeah we were really starting to. To see the need for a room change in thinking about supply chain execution and how systems can support that. And, uh, having worked in plant and warehouse, she said for over 30 years, her house to me has been this remarkably stable operating model. You know, we have a real time warehouse management system interacts with humans through a, a handheld device of some kind or a wearable device, you know, voice wearable, display, whatever the client, It looks like, but you have essentially called transactional visibility. You had the defined transactions in the WMS. It has rules, it has zones. It has assumptions about what's going on in the facility, but it can't really sense directly what's happening. It doesn't know that materials are, they are just knows that the person scanned something or keyed something and it makes inferences based on that. And yet increasingly we have these. sensor capabilities that can sense the physical world directly. And, and that's just a fundamental paradigmatic change in how you might run a physical operations. And we see this is not just a warehouse phenomenon, right? It's it's happening in the plant floor. It's happening in the clinical healthcare environment, in some extent it's happening even in, in the retail store, but the warehouse is unique because it's so highly structured, that we've been directing and control. Controlling and confirming, activities and material moves in the warehouse through this WMS paradigm. Literally for decades with really very little change. And yet as zebra, we were bringing more and more sensor-based technology to the supply chain, you know, think about real time locationing solutions. Think about our SmartPack trailer, where we've got LIDAR and other sensors peering into a trailer as it's loaded or unloaded. And we needed to kind of come up with a way to put all of them, all of the legacy approaches, which by the way, We know we're going to be around for very long time because of just the way that warehouse market works, as well as these brands sensor-based technologies and put that all in one context. So we can have one conversation with our channel partners, with our customers, um, with the market analysts, you know, everybody who needs to keep their. Finger on the pulse of, of the warehouse market and help guide, the end users in making technology decisions. And that led us to this idea of a maturity model, where we could lay out okay, under this paradigm, you know, here's how you progress through the technology. And here's what makes sense for you. And as you expand into this new paradigm where we've got. More sensors and we can open up, you know, ML and AI to physical operations. Here's how you address that.

Todd 5:42

Right. I love that part. I'm very excited about where things are going and taking advantages of all that technology that you've been building into the zebras set, as well as your partnerships. I think it might be good to maybe take a step back. Let's talk about the health crisis. I mean, you and the team at zebra, we're working with, businesses every day together. Right? I'd love to hear from your perspective though, like what are some of the things that you're hearing themes on or where you're seeing areas that. you know, the, the businesses are, are tackling technology and how they're, a volunteer through this whole pandemic that we're in. if you don't mind sharing, like what, what that looks like, from, from some of your engagements that you've been involved with.

Mark 6:25

I think it's very situational in the specifics, but in general, there's, there's a lot of uncertainty that customers have had to deal with and that's manifested itself in, in operations. I think there's a. A new appreciation for, you know, having a supply chain that is resilient. There's a new appreciation for managing risk. There's a new appreciation for the value of visibility into the supply chain because you can't really dynamically, you know, change your ways if you don't know what you have and where it is, you know, kind of fundamental themes, that are out there. And then you have this whole idea of social distancing and, and the idea that. That becomes a new design constraint in my operational, concept something that it is almost antithetical to the way that we've. Thought about operational design. You know, we've always put a lot of focus in eliminating non value, added steps. Literally, you know, non-value at a time minimizing travel, you know, how much effort goes into laying out a warehouse and designing the material storage equipment and, and slotting so that you minimize travel time. So you're putting people closer together in many situations. Right. So how do we now incorporate this idea of social distancing into operational design? I think a lot of. Customers are looking at that. And you know, of course we have our, we call it motion, works proximity, but we have a solution that enables you to kind of track when people have been close for a period of time and you can kind of give them some feedback in real time said, Hey, here's something you know, that you need to be aware of. And then over time, if you have a positive test result, for example, you can go back and see, well, who is that person interacted with in a significant way that. Solution. We, we rolled out that rolled that out very quick, quickly, and it's gotten a tremendous reception, but, everybody's dealing with change. And of course, some customers. Uh, they've just been slammed with demand or they've seen their operational profiles, radically change, you know, toward, towards e-commerce, maybe from store-based fulfillment and some have seen the opposite. They've seen the demand for their products crash, but everybody's seen change and everybody's had to react and trying to figure out is this temporary is a permanent, is it somewhere in the middle? how do I react to it?

Todd 8:35

That's the truth, you know? I think. it's always good to be looking at your business. Right. And how do I, how do I look for continuous improvement? But, the one thing now, you know, with what we're going through, right. Almost even more so what, what should I be doing? I'd like to walk through, the zebra warehouse maturity model, and let's look at. these like incremental, modernization approach that you guys like to talk about, in how you can look at this, if you want to call it a playbook, look at this path and. And start to look for improvements and where can I be as a manufacturer or in this case, like warehouse will zone in to improve and harness technology. when do I implement what? and I'd like to maybe kind of just start stepping through that cause, you guys are really built out a nice path for businesses to consider.

Mark 9:28

I think we really break it down into. To two sections phases one and two of the maturity model we think of is based on, you know, worker driven transactional data. So that's the, that's the paradigm that's been in place since real time warehouse management systems were invented, right. real time in this case generally means sub-second response time. And, uh, in, in the phase, one of that would be, you know, It's probably about 40% of the market today. they've got basic control of material movements from receiving through shipping. The WMS has controlling that a smaller, medium sized business that might be all that they need. to operate effectively and to get the job done as their business grows, either in size or complexity, complexity can come from many different directions, you know, volume skew mix, what have you regularly. Then they need to become more advanced danced in the way that they use, mobility technology. So even though they're still in that paradigm of worker driven transactional data with a real time WMS, they need to get smarter about. leveraging wearable technology, making sure that they're getting, the best performance they can in terms of productivity, in terms of accuracy, in terms of minimizing. A workman's comp repetitive stress in terms of providing solutions that are easy for their, employees or associates to learn and use. So if they have a lot turnover, can they onboard quickly because they've got easy to use, intuitive touch based user experiences. are there, are they leveraging the mobile devices to communicate effectively within the team and not just drive? Uh, WMS transactions, have they made the move to Android? Many customers are still, you know, using the, the legacy windows, mobile devices. As we move to Android, there is a, there's a huge amount of software, utilities and tools. that are available most of them for free from in the zebra ecosystem so that you can, operate more effectively. So if you're on the it side, you know, it's about managing, securing, the infrastructure, knowing where your assets are, how well are they utilized? Are they in. Do you know, where are they in the process? If you're on the operation side, it's about making sure that your people are as productive as they can be. And there's all kinds of tools available to help them do that, including, you know, voice directed utilities, head wearable, display, solutions. We've seen a lot of interest in growth in wearable technologies. You know, as you move into e-commerce you move into higher transaction rates per let's say unit of revenue. You move into higher returns. You know, these are labor intensive, operations. And so you really have to use the right wearable technology to get the operational results. So that's phases one and two are kind of within that, that legacy paradigm as we get into phase three, that's when we start looking at. Sensor technology and sensing the physical world directly. And, and we sort of carved out phase three as you're applying that to a limited area within, uh, within the warehouse or, or the plant. And that's how most customers get started with us. So we think of passive RFID, active locationing solutions, LIDAR, our SmartPack trailer solution, for example, that, that, um, Yeah, monitors, trailer loading and unloading. We're using LIDAR. We're using RGB camera. we're doing a lot of analytics based on that in real time. And then, you know, storing that data for, more strategic analysis of the process. And that's an example of, of a targeted, area of, of the DC that drives a lot of spend, you know, it's a lot of expense and transportation, but there's very little, typically very little hard data that's really available about what, how, you know, how these trailers are really being packed out. Are they being well utilized? Are they being packed properly in terms of preventing damage? Yeah, load balancing all of that information. it's, it's funny. It's not that

Todd 13:34

we're working with you on a project right now. it's in, uh, like early phase right now of, of the, of the proof of concept, but, but it had to do with loading and, they dealt with, the product who was a food company. They did, it's a glass product. it's in glass jar. but they could only. Load them so high. and what was happening is they would, they would load them too high and they would get to the other end and find, you know, entire pallet of chef shattered jars, because it's too much weight.

Mark 14:02

with the turnover

Todd 14:03

topic, right? You talked about that and workers, maybe not knowing it's. Things are moving so quickly. you might've told them like, Oh, it's only supposed to be two to a pallet tie all the time, but, it almost has kind of their second, like a reminder, like a, you're not supposed to be loading it that high or like this is, you know, and it's the system is, is really cool how it works and it's solving. Problems which it's costs, it's also go back to customer experience. Now I just delivered a bunch of, I delivered your order, but half of it smashed, you know, in, in this particular case and, this, this particular issue was, it was well over a million dollars in damages every year. That net we're working together with, with you on, on this, um, this particular solution. So, so it's, it's hard though when you're in the back of the truck, how do you really prove how it was loaded? Because those guys are going so quick. He got the other docs that they got a load and it's like, you know, there's tough job. It's kind of like slammed the door and I'm going to the next one. Right. So,

Mark 15:01

yeah, it's a very tough job, but he said, you know, the financial risk is, is substantial. Even just emerged charges and everything from the, from the carriers, you know, There's a lot of costs there. And usually you've got a manager walking around that may be very, very good, but to be able to give them in real time on alerts, such as that, Hey, this product is stacked too high. this trailer's not well utilized. What have you. in real time, it's very powerful. It's in the Palm of their hand, they can see on their mobile device, they can see really actually every doctor in their entire enterprise, not just in the facility, if, if they need to, and then over time, if you're experiencing high damage, you can go back and you've got all the data you could possibly want to do any kind of hard analytics about, you know, what should we do to, to manage this?

Todd 15:44

Yeah, it's definitely very impressive.

Mark 15:47

what we find is it. Almost any operator, regardless of industry. So retail wholesale three PL manufacturer. If they're, if they're running a, supply chain with substantial size or complexity, they come to the table with a problem like that, that the legacy approaches to solving just haven't gotten the job done. So their inventory accuracy, isn't what it needs to be. Or they're not. You know, they're not managing FIFO the way they need to, or, you know, there's, there's usually something where, you know, if we could just get a handle on this and we've tried everything with the legacy approach and that's where we can start to say, okay, well, let's, let's look at, uh, what sort of sensor technology we can leverage to, automatically. Prevent this from happening or drive those KPIs.

Todd 16:29

Yeah. I've seen some cool things that you guys have been doing, even like with getting the worker to the right dock door and say, you walk into the wrong or into the wrong trailer. it gives you an alert or something, right

Mark 16:40

oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah. Uh, an innovation that came out about 12 months ago, Um, there's another fundamental shift in how things are done and it relies on RFID. So if we can get a passive RFID tag on the pallets on the inbound or the outbound, what this is, is a wide area, passive reader, right. And you know, the readers in the past would, might be able to come over a, a large area, but it basically says it's present, or it's not, you know, somewhere in my, in my. In my field of this antenna is this tag, this particular reader with phased array technology can, can tell you this, the location of that tag within a couple of feet, which means that I can, I can manage a dock with that. So that's actually kind of carries us into phase four because now I've got a technology. Yeah.

Todd 17:27

Uh, I was going to say it's like a perfect

Mark 17:29

segue. Yeah. Now I've got a technology that can cover a large area of the, of the operation cycle cover the entire building or, or the receiving or the shipping dock, and depends on the problem we're trying to solve. but I can very cost efficiently now create a real time location solution that is sensing the materials themselves directly. Um, not just maybe I, you know, in the past I may have associated with a lift truck and then, you know, I break that association. I sort of infer where that. Materials are now I can sense that directly, really interesting use cases on the inbound. Uh, if I've got product that shows up, I can do an, you know, a no touch receipt I can automatically, uh, or, or very quickly in real time, direct that to. To where it's needed, if it's needed for a customer order. That's cool. Um, if I've got cold chain items and they're sitting on it, ambient doc, I know that immediately. I can, yeah, take action. I can start a timer. I can say, start to automatically run the business based on what I'm sensing in the physical environment. I think. And that is, that is a, a real shift from the, from the past. Well,

Todd 18:34

so now as you start to introduce, like, now let's go a little bit further out there. If you look at like AMRs though, right. And automation. And how does that now start to lay into. Phase four, like where, where do we go from now on that component?

Mark 18:50

They fit phase four beautifully because they know where they are. So they're, uh, they're, it's like having a mobile real time location solution. So you can make, you can use that as a sensor platform, leveraging RFID or cameras or scanners. Obviously it can carry materials. So if you want to design in social distancing to an operation, the great thing about them is that you can put them into an existing operation in many situations without having to relay out the building. or start moving materials around or changing aisle wits, you know, depending on your facility. Yeah. So it's a relatively low risk, scalable way of, of taking non-value out of travel out of the, out of the process.

Todd 19:26

And that's key. travel time is killer. the AMRs has been great to have that flexibility. Like you said, to be able to move, to be able to adjust whether it's a change in the business or yeah. Maybe peak, types of time frames or whatnot, but the AMR has had been really excited about that. Set of solutions, but also how it compliments your technology and ultimately how to impact it.

Mark 19:50

Yeah. It doesn't require commitment. You know, automation got a bad rap and a lot, a lot of situations in the past because it required that kind of, first of all, you had to make a, a big design decision based on data that represented the future. None of us are that good at predicting the future? We know we're going to be wrong. It's

Todd 20:08

in the middle of right now. So

20:09

how

Mark 20:09

long are we going to be? and then that capital had to play out, uh, productively over a fairly long period of time to pay for itself. And you know, maybe that worked out and with these, you can deploy them. You can use them if it works out great. If it doesn't. You know, you can take them back.

Todd 20:22

You know, there's a lot of talk about AI machine learning, things like that. Right. And how you can harness it in the supply chain to, improve the business. But, but as you work on that predictive and adaptive, proactive performance approvement type of a mode, you know, how does zebra layer in giving some guidance to, businesses.

Mark 20:42

certainly AI is being applied today over on supply supply chain, wide problems, you know, improving inventory management and order allocation across the supply chain network. Very complex problem. within the DC or within the manufacturing plant. What we see is when we get to a point where, we we've instrumented the assets, the material handling assets, we've instrumented, the people, we know that where our people are. And a lot of resistance to that has come down with the pandemic situation. And we've instrumented the materials maybe through passive RFID, most likely, because of the cost, of the solution with that, then we can start to really. Leverage machine learning and AI to control the warehouse when we can count on that level of data and that level of automated visibility to goods, assets, and people. And that. Is something that is very exciting in terms of having a warehouse solution that adapts to what's happening in the physical world, instead of what we often have today, which is a physical world is constantly changing order profiles, you know, skews, what have you. And the D and the warehouse management systems, where was control systems. They're kind of static, you know, they're, they're, they're, they've got the rules that were set up. we've done our testing. We've promoted it to production, we're running it. and then. you start to get a mismatch between the real world and the model of the real world. That's kind of embedded in the WMS. As that mismatch gets bigger, we start to experience pain, in lack of productivity or unable to ship orders or unable to get the replenishments done, whatever that pain is. For some reason, it seems to usually come up and replenishment about it and, Then we go, and then we go in, when that pain gets big enough to go through that process, again, of reconfiguring testing and promoting, then we go through that process again and it starts over. What we'd like to be able to do is be constantly adapting, through ML machine learning and artificial intelligence to what's happening in the physical world. And that I do believe we will get there as an industry over time.

Todd 22:44

That's really exciting. you know, I know you and the team are working with these businesses every day that lean on zebra, and the technology you bring, to their operation. can you maybe help us, kind of get a flavor from what customers are telling you and any themes or we're kind of common ground, of what, what customers are, expressing to you in your engagements?

Mark 23:07

we get a pretty consistent view of the future from, you know, whether we're talking to our customers, to our WMS partners or, or the industry analysts, you know, I think we're, we're all in pretty good alignment. You know, it's more about timing. We had a really interesting finding from our recent warehouse vision survey, you know, every year we, we commissioned these surveys and we'll go out and we'll interview 1500, professionals. we covered the different geographies around the world. We also make sure that we cover, both the it side and the operations side of the enterprises that we're talking to. And one of the interesting questions that we asked them, you know, what are the key performance indicators that are. That you have to get right. to be successful. And we asked them, what does that today? And what do you think it's going to be in five years? And when they answered day, it was all about the people. You know, we gotta make our individual workers more productive. We've got to make them work more together as a team. So, you know, that's wearable technology. It's. It's communications technology to make sure that we, are doing the best we can to, to make sure our workers are getting the job done as you. And the answer to that from five years out was all about, okay, we've got to make sure our assets are visible and highly utilized. We've got to make sure we're leveraging real time data. And that we're really operating based on what that data is telling us so

Todd 24:31

our focus here is, you know, how do we improve. The individual worker productivity, how are we going to make that person get a little bit more out, going to get a better level of quality, that we talk about all the time on, on Optech insights here. there's key functions that we're all trying to drive for, you know, maximizing the ROA, reducing risk.,there's so many things to be, looking at, in an ever changing kind of environment like we're in today, you know, almost hour by hour. It feels like it sometimes, but, you know, I really appreciate you walking through, everything you shared with us today. I think it's really valuable. and there's some takeaways that, our listeners probably can be thinking through, but also maybe a little bit.

Mark 25:14

Confused as to what to

Todd 25:15

do now. sometimes you're so close to a situation, that it can be a little bit daunting as to what step I do now. so I do like the breakdown, any more recommendations that someone can, can look at, as kind of a walking out of, what we've talked about today and what they can be doing.

Mark 25:33

Yeah, I think an outside perspective is, is very valuable and I would recommend they, you know, reach out to Heartland, reach out to zebra, get the right expert. We're happy to, to do a walkthrough, assess your operation and, help you put a technology plan. That makes sense. Makes sense for you.

Todd 25:49

Well, it's super cool to see, you know, the evolution, with zebra and really love what you're bringing to the table to share with us. and, and talk to our listeners about. About, what zebra is doing and what you guys are focused on. Cause it's pretty awesome.

Mark 26:04

That's what, it's a great place to work. It's a lot of fun. Cause you do get to see a lot of different operations and how, how people operate and, and help people get, help. Companies get a little bit better and what they do and, and, having designed and built warehouses in the past. You know, I, I believe strongly that the, you know, your execution technology choices are inherently strategic choices and they're important and they should support your business strategy. Hey,

Todd 26:30

it doesn't get any better than what you just said. That's the truth for sure. and I'm sure, many people listening they can appreciate, that thought there. Mark. Thanks so much for joining us today at Optech insights, really was excited to get you on here, here, and I'm just like super Jack to have you on here to talk about. All you have shared with us. thank you for, the time today and talking to our audience,

Mark 26:54

it's been a pleasure.

Todd 26:54

Awesome. Hey audience. Thanks for joining my guest Mark Wheeler today from zebra technologies. love what we've been talking about, and I've been getting some great feedback from some of you. Okay. Out in the an utter listening audience, please feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or wherever you want to connect with me. Give me some of that feedback, what you want to hear more about, or dig deeper into again, subscribe now to hear more about Optech insights and what we have coming up and thanks for joining me on Optech insights. This is your host Todd Greenwald.