Transcript

Alright folks, welcome back to Automate Live. We're here in the afternoon on Tuesday and we've got Glenn Guernsey, Chief Engineer of Jr. Automation. Welcome to Automate Live. Thank you. Glad to be here. Excited to have you here. My name is Chris Lukey, I'm host of the Manufacturing Happy Hour podcast. And that's that's a little relevant for our first conversation because we want to start off with a little bit about you, your role and your organization. So let's say you're having a beverage with someone. At the Automate happy hour after the show wraps up for the day, how do you describe what you and Jr. Automation do is if you're having a beverage with someone, certainly. So Jr. Automation, we're a customs automation provider where customs integrator. We don't sell widgets. We don't have anything in a catalog you can get. Most of what we do is a one off, one time customize drawn or excuse me, built to spec, built to whatever the customer specifications. Are what I do at Jr. Automation is I'm a chief engineer, which chief engineers at Jr. are subject matter experts and my area of expertise is warehouse automation, ATV's and AMR's. So I go around to all the different client sites, all the different possible opportunities and if it has something to do with any of those subjects at HGV's might be involved or there might be some warehouse automation, I evaluate and see whether this is a good fit. In what way to go and try to help the clients and point them in the right direction to what it is they need and how we might go about it. Well, gosh, I could ask a ton of different questions around a GV AMR's warehouse automation specifically, but let's start off with a more general 1 so you can kind of choose your own adventure. What do you see happening happening in warehouse automation right now? The big thing that you're seeing happening in automation, I should say the the most innovative thing that's out there has to do with random skew palatization, a lot of that. So what they started out with deep pallet where they would just take off all of the the pallets. So we've had automated palletization for a very long time. There's machines that palletize the widgets when all the boxes are the same. Now when you now have random skube, different size boxes coming in, how do you palletize those? And up until recently, with the advances in AI and advances in vision system, this was not something that was easily, easily done. And now there's a whole mess of different robotic systems and vision systems and different ways to tackle this. And AI has become a very big part of it too, to learn how in terms of the palatization and the deep palatization. So that's probably the most recent biggest change you've seen in warehouse automation. Conveyors have been around for years. Types of conveyors have been around for years, types disorders have been around for years, but what we're sorting may have changed. We've added Polly bags a few years back and things like that. And then now with the labor shortage, that's probably the biggest problem that most warehouses are having is just getting the labor. You need to supplement that with automation. It's doing the things that either they can't get the people to do or they're just isn't people to do, or it's a safety concern and they need to automate. Situation or automate something well I think what you're describing makes a lot of sense that the first thing that came to mind was random SKU palletization yeah the fact that you have the technology from the vision systems as well as ongoing advances in artificial intelligence makes it easier to take on a random assortment packages for example with inside of a warehouse. You also talked about Agvs and AMR and, and I'd like to get your take on AMR adoption because. This was, if we look back a decade, something that was on the rise, but it certainly wasn't proven out. Right now, I get the sense it's pretty well proven out. And it's like, don't wait around like this is, you know, you don't need to experiment with this. You really need to start looking at this and implementing AMR solutions within a warehouse. Does that resonate or what would you add or change to that comment? So there's different ways to go about any AMR. Implementation, there's the full on, I want to completely eliminate manual movements and I just want everything going into the rack, coming out of the rack going to shipping to be moved by a GV AMR's. That's a full huge system, but you don't have to do all that. There's much simplified where you might have pickers picking pallets, but then they're taking all that time to drive to over drive, drop off at shipping, drive all the way back and it's essentially it's a deadhead. That's a perfect. Implementation of where an AMR and AGB could take that palette, take it to shipping and come back or bring the empties back and then you've got your pickers having more time to pick. So that that's kind of where I see a lot of the right now with the ATV's. I think the next thing that we're seeing in a lot of advances in automation is fork style Agvs that can find the pockets. The biggest thing that we're hoping to see major advancements in. Right now there's only a couple of companies that are doing it is being able to load trucks or unload trucks. Some people can do one or the other. They can't. There isn't anybody really that can do both very, very well unless the load is done by an AG V, then the unload can be done by a GV's. OK, So those are still things that are kind of have to be done manually, but they're seeing advancements and things year after year that are getting us closer to where that can. This will be automated and just to confirm, I understand you correctly on on the fork trucks, you're saying automated where it can find where they need to like insert themselves? Exactly. So if you've got a palette that's on the ground, you need to have a fork style pick it up. If you've got a pallet or whatever that you can put on to a stand, you can get a much more affordable platform style a GV to go underneath that, lift it up and move it around. So when you have to pick it up off the floor or drop it on the floor as opposed to a stand or a conveyor. Then you have to go to a fork style. Yep. So fork style as well as loading and unloading. I think that was very important emphasis that you're kind of seeing one or the other right now. We'll get back into what's coming in warehouse automation. But first for the present and I'd say actionable advice for the audience, what are 6 like characteristics of successful projects that you see? And we'll get into the pitfalls after this. I'm glad you asked. So we do a lot. I mean, everybody out there gets RFQ's. Then somebody will give you a piece of paper and says here, build this. This is what I want you to build. Give me a price to build this and they've already figured it out and this is what they want. The ones that are more successful for us is when the client would come to us and says, here's our problem or I want to solve this and we work with them to come up with possible solutions. We go back and forth and it's not something that you're just building what somebody's already figured out. Don't get me wrong, we do a lot of that and. A lot of those are very successful, but the ones that really make a difference is when you have the partnership and the client comes to you and says, help me solve this. So they would come to us and say I want to do whatever it is. So some of the things we talked about, I'm trying to load a truck, but I've got these problems with loading. I'm trying to build pallets and I've got these things. So we work with them to develop a system for them and we then do a proof of principle, proof of concept if we have to. Go through and build an alpha, learn from the alpha, do that at our shop, do that at their floor. Then go back and do a beta, maybe a several betas to look at. Alright, here's how we're making it better. Here's what we've learned from the alpha. And then we've got a project or a product that is now custom for them exactly what it is they want. We'll solve what they want and they own it. It's theirs. We've done it for them and we can build as many of them as they need. And that's really where Jr. shines is because. We have the ability to scale that, to build an enormous amount of these and and as and support them as they go. So as things change and they want updates and other things, things like that that we can do. So to me, those are the more successful projects than the ones where this just build this. I want to ask you about some of the things for folks to avoid as well. So what are the pitfalls you see in project And I can maybe envision some of these from your last answer. What are pitfalls you'd caution folks to avoid? One of the pitfalls that I see all the time is when people do this, they say, OK, we want to build this or we want to design this. They go out and they find different people will quote on it and they may go with a supplier that can't scale, can't support. This is a very common thing where you've developed this, you've developed this with a new startup company or a company that's given you great attention and they've given you. A great pricing because they're very, very small. Well, they can build you the one. And you test that one and now you say, hey, that's great. Now let me have 10. They start to have a little problem and now you say, OK, I need 15 of these things. And now they can't come, come do that anymore. And then those companies end up going away. And now you've developed a project that you now need to find somebody else to take over and try to build and work with. So I've seen this happen in the industry where the decision on who to go with from the start is made strictly from a dollar versus a partnership. Question, So you pick the the lowest price, but that's generally what you're going to get is the lowest price. You have to keep in mind, do they have the ability to to scale? And that's one of the pitfalls that I see a lot of times for larger scale projects, things where you're going to need a lot of these things and you're developing them. Now if you're building A1 off, this is it, I'm never going to do it again. I understand that and we compete very well there. But if it's something where you want to make into a much, much larger project, you want somebody who's going to be there. Before the long haul and be around 10 years from now to still take care of you. And that's where Jr. really comes into play. You've got two more quick questions for you. The first one came from one year last answers. You're talking about how you know by the end of your project you've created a custom solution for the client. How do you balance customization and not getting into scope creep, if you will, to making sure there's some, let's say, repeatability or at least best practices you're leveraging? To ensure that even though it is custom for that client, you're continuing to do things that are well within your expertise, if that makes sense. I think so. What I would say is we learn an awful lot. Yes, we do a lot of custom stuff, but we've got guys that know, they know welding, We've got guys that know how to build pallets. We've got guys that know vision system. And even though this might be new to the client, we've done so much of it. So we learn from that. We can't. Necessarily, if I've developed something for for a client, I can't now say, look, I've built this, I can sell this to you too. Yeah, but I can say I can build one for you. But what I've learned from this other one, I don't have to relearn. I don't have to reinvent the wheel. So I can go through and use all that expertise and, and help them and, and go at it that way. You have all these building blocks for these applications that you can, you know, it's almost like you're assembling the solution. From some of these fundamental building blocks. Yeah, they all come together. Well, my last question for you then is looking ahead to the future. And, and we talked about, you know, bringing together loading and unloading, for example, but what do you see maybe paint the picture of the warehouse of the future? I see there are two main things that you're going to see advances in. And I think we're going to see them fairly quickly too. I think we're going to see major advances in #1 we touched on that was the mixed skew palatization 10. There are people out there that. Do that now, but a lot of that is done with sequencing. So they bring in certain boxes at a certain time and they build it by layers of the layers are similar. When you have a random mix skew where it's totally random coming in. We're going to see major advances to be able to do what a human can do and maybe take boxes, move them, put something else in to be able to fit and to build that palette if you will, and make a much more utilized palette. I see that is the number one thing we're going to see happen first. The second thing where I see major. Advances in is in fluid load and unload of trailers. This is where you've got a trailer of a truck that's loaded up with boxes. There aren't pallets. You're trying to put as much stuff in there as possible and there are systems out there. But so far most of those systems are huge, very large things. And I think we're going to see major advances in when we can get these boxes off of a truck or onto that truck in a fluid load fashion. Maybe not be uniform, but be well utilized and find some. Information that can do it that way. I think those are the two major things that are going to make a major difference in the world of automation and at warehouses. Well, Glenn, I appreciate you taking us through the present and the future of warehouse automation in this conversation. For everyone out there, we'll be back with more Automate Live very soon.