C-Suite Interview: Reducing Cost to Serve, Increasing Warehouse Productivity

Andrew Southgate, VP of Business Development, EMEA, Lucas Systems, Inc.

MMH: What is the number one thing that you’re hearing from the market right now?

Andrew Southgate: Companies are looking for ways to reduce the cost to serve and increase warehouse productivity. The lack of quality labor and rising labor costs are among companies’ greatest operational challenges right now.
Organizations also feel restricted by their current warehouse management systems (WMS). For example, there’s a heavy reliance on manual tasks, static waving of orders, serpentine pick paths and inflexible prioritization. These issues prevent companies from dynamically adapting and responding to their customers’ ever-changing needs and requirements. They need smart technology to help them solve these problems and get to the next level of customer service and efficiency.

MMH: What top three trends are impacting the market?
Southgate:The top three areas are warehouse automation, e-commerce and the persistent labor shortage. A lot of companies are considering warehouse automation to help them gain efficiencies. This issue is shifting from being “operations centric” and over to more of a board-level imperative. Executives on the board are unsure of warehouse optimization, the challenges associated with implementing it and which direction to travel in.
The busy e-commerce marketplace is another trend that continues to drive business decisions. It’s the fastest growing market sector and mastering it requires a dynamic approach to warehouse optimization. Finally, the warehouse/distribution labor struggles appear to be mounting, namely in terms of getting quality employees to staff these operations, specifically hiring, training and retaining their team members.

MMH: How is Lucas Systems reacting to these market trends? Southgate:We’re responding with our dynamic warehouse optimization solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The solutions offer dynamic batching, pick path optimization and dynamic slotting software, all of which are essential to support the fast-moving e-commerce market, which necessitates a dynamic warehouse optimization approach.  

Also, Lucas Systems’ future-proof digital and adaptive optimization platform is easily integrated with existing WMSs and automation. Strategic board-level decisions can be made with confidence, knowing that our digital automation—or a change that’s made to a WMS system—happens without any operational disruption.

We understand that executives are very averse to the potential risks associated with automation, so we take the time to explain the low risk associated with implementing an optimization platform and integrating that platform with existing automation. Lucas Systems’ optimization platform makes smart, dynamic optimization decisions, orchestrating the work of AMRs and humans in the most efficient way possible. This also addresses many of the labor-related issues that companies are dealing with right now.