DHL's Warehouse Management Business Makes It Easier to Onboard Robots
November 23 2020 - 5:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Jared Council
Integrating robots into warehouses is traditionally
time-consuming and costly. A unit of global logistics giant
Deutsche Post AG and one of its technology suppliers think they
might have found a better way.
DHL Supply Chain and Blue Yonder Inc. over the past year have
been collaborating on Robotics Hub, a software platform designed to
more quickly integrate robotics systems into warehouse
operations.
It is one of several efforts in the industry to improve the
usefulness of robots in warehouses, where they are increasingly
common.
The platform is currently online at one location near Madrid,
where it has already reduced integration time for new robot systems
by 60%, said Markus Voss, DHL Supply Chain's global chief
information officer and chief operating officer.
"We're at the beginning of the journey," Mr. Voss said. "We are
implementing it as we speak at two additional sites, and we think
it has applicability across all of our sites."
The continuing shift to internet commerce and rolling lockdowns
in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic have fueled the need for
robotics and automation solutions across a range of businesses.
Logistics centers have seen double-digit increases in orders since
the outbreak started, and robots are seen as a source of labor that
can't be vectors for the virus.
The Deutsche Post unit operates more than 2,000 warehouses on
behalf of other companies. About a quarter have physical robots,
including item-picking robots and self-driving forklifts for
transporting goods.
Integrations can take months, largely because the software that
operates them must be manually configured to work with individual
warehouse-management software systems, Mr. Voss said. The robotics
hub, which comes programmed with the ability to speak to different
systems, removes the need for custom software configurations at
each warehouse.
The idea for the hub came about during a meeting between
officials at DHL and Blue Yonder, driven by DHL needs. Blue Yonder
handled software development, while DHL provided information,
including warehouse workflows, that helped dictate how the system
was designed. Microsoft Corp., which runs the Azure cloud service
that hosts the hub, provided software architecture expertise.
Blue Yonder owns the robotics hub product and, for now, DHL is
the only subscriber.
The robotics hub went live at its first site in May at a
warehouse in Seseña Nuevo, Spain, that DHL runs for IskayPet SL,
parent company of Spanish pet-supplies retailers Tiendanimal and
Kiwoko.
Pedro Reinaldos, logistics director at IskayPet, said the hub
has helped his company manage order growth that has neared 20%
annually the past few years.
Mr. Voss said integrating a new robotics fleet at a warehouse
can often take more than three months and cost at least $100,000.
Much of the time and cost relate to having IT teams from the
various stakeholders configuring software.
"Due to the different nature of the operations, you would always
need some IT people to do the matching," he said about onboarding
new robots. "That is something that we wanted to engineer out of
the system: How can we get the whole integration faster so that
it's more of a plug and play."
A robotics hub operates as middleware, designed to speak both to
the warehouse management system and the fleet management system. It
works by standardizing the data and tasks that flow between the two
systems, such as the shelf location of a retail product and the
quantity of product to pick.
At the Madrid-area warehouse, the robotics hub facilitates
communication between robot software developed by 6 River Systems
Inc. and warehouse management software from Blue Yonder. DHL could
redeploy the hub at another location with those systems without
additional programming, Mr. Voss said.
Even if the hub is deployed at a location with different
software, it is equipped with application programming interfaces
and connectors that reduce the work needed "relative to traditional
integrations," Blue Yonder senior product director Prabodh Joshi
said.
Another benefit: The hub can orchestrate tasks between robots
that otherwise don't speak to each other. For instance, if a
picking robot will be functioning at a time that obstructs the path
of a transport robot, the hub will know that in advance and tell
the transport robot to choose a different location for its target
item.
Mr. Voss expects the hub to reduce implementation time from
weeks and months to days and cut costs from six figures "to a
relatively low five-figure number," he said.
Dwight Klappich, a fellow at research and consulting firm
Gartner Inc., said there will likely be a growing need for
platforms that can manage different types of robots. "As robots
continue to grow, it's going to become increasingly important."
Write to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 23, 2020 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
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