A Call to Action: Now is the Time to Communicate, Collaborate, and Innovate

In my 50-plus years of working in the supply chain, I have never witnessed a double whammy of an unexpectedly terrifying health crisis and a resulting economic meltdown.  And now, our supply chains are under enormous duress.  So far, our supply chain infrastructure and technology have held up moderately well with one exception: human beings. We get sick, make other people sick, and, once sick, cannot work. For health and safety purposes, we need technology that can monitor people who work, shop, and play in crowded environments to mitigate disease risk. Unfortunately, that won’t be enough to keep the supply chain healthy. Wherever practical, we also need to take the human risk out of the supply chain, particularly in the close quarters of a warehouse, and let machines perform this work. We humans have become the weakest link in the supply chain. 

In the past (two months ago), it would have been rare to find leaders advocating to eliminate jobs in the supply chain because there was not nearly enough available labor for all the open positions. In this crisis era, I feel it is the time to say clearly and out loud: We need to find a way to remove the human element for the sake of everyone’s safety and automate as much as possible to keep our supply chains from breaking down.  Life in warehouses and fulfillment centers will never be the same again. One might assume that labor will be plentiful because so many are out of work, but I believe this will be a brief condition. Even before the pandemic, warehouse workers’ safety was a concern. Now, workers' rights organizations and unions will demand even greater safety measures — and they should. The health and safety of humans are paramount. New  workplace rules such physical spacing, wellness checks, hazard pay, and the like may help, but it will make the cost of having humans tightly working together in a warehouse very complicated and financially prohibitive. Regardless, humans will continue to catch and pass on diseases while robots simply cannot.

Employees will always be the most important asset of any business. It’s time we take humans out of harm’s way while at the same time mitigate risks to supply chains and individual businesses. Failure to deal with the disease risk humans pose to each other will mean future company bankruptcies, causing further economic disruptions and putting more people out of work.

Will a crisis like this ever happen again? I am not certain, but I do know we need to prepare for that prospect to make sure that we mitigate, or more desirably, to eliminate, this risk. I believe now is the time for all of us to reassess our relationship between man and machine for our own future’s sake. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) designed to mimic human work and have been around for a while. But the field of AMRs need increased investment in order to achieve the next level of innovation. Today, a clear threat exists to our supply chain. It could harshly and suddenly break now or in the near future. We need to recognize that autonomous automation is not a luxury anymore, it has become a necessity.  We need to act.

Considerable automation is already in place today, but most of this technology was designed to augment human work tasks, not replace them. Current automation technology still makes us humans the weak point in the system. The technology in place now, although easier to create and implement compared to autonomous mobile robots, does not eliminate the human risk in the supply chain.  It does not solve the issues we face today and tomorrow.  

The main reason we don’t have fully automated warehouses now is because the technology is not quite there yet. Human capability still outstrips robot capability when it comes to many tasks in e-commerce. As technologically advanced as they are, autonomous mobile robots today cannot perform all the tasks associated with picking, fulfilling and transporting e-commerce orders. In my experience, creating a robot that can perform these duties with the know-how and skill of a human while working in coordination with other robots, is very hard. In addition to emulating human work tasks, these robots would need to work minimally 20 hours a day, seven  days a week and must be operationally bulletproof to work in harsh industrial environments. The faint-of-heart need not apply for creating robotic solutions that meet all these criteria.  

In past financial crisis periods (the dot-com bubble burst and last decade’s Great Recession come to mind), many technology companies — sometimes strategically planned, sometimes forced together — collaborated on joint developments and innovations like never before. It is time to revisit this cooperative spirit.

That is why I am calling on all material handling, shuttle, AS/RS, autonomous robot manufacturers, scientists, engineers, designers, consultants as well as warehouse workers, workers unions, and even customers, to come together in order to collaborate and innovate solutions that finally and completely take the human risk out of the supply chain. We do not want to go through these same risk issues again; we need to raise the bar and take autonomous automation to the next level. I am asking that we communicate and exchange ideas, collaborate on automation solutions and innovate together where we can improve each other’s technologies and products.  

Please contact me and let’s start together. Kindly reach out to me though my LinkedIn page.  Thank you.