Watch: To Succeed, Warehouse Technology Needs to Promote Interoperability

While warehouse technology has evolved considerably over the last 20 years or so, the market is falling short in not providing enough interoperability, says Patrick Maley, chief executive officer of Softeon.

The overarching theme in the warehouse is the ever-growing demands of the customer and the accompanying complexity, says Maley. What operators need today is agility and flexibility to react to changing customer needs. “Supply chain execution can be a real challenge because of the nitty gritty of mapping software to a physical operation. So, flexibility and agility are key to any successful warehouse operator.”

Where warehouse operators have gone wrong is in trying to keep everything within their ecosystem and control of everything happening in their facility, Maley says. “That’s locked people in. It's made them less agile, more dependent on their vendor and less enabled. They're reliant on the supply chain vendors, which we believe is the wrong way to do it, but that's been the challenge.”

In Maley’s view, those ecosystems need to be opened up to all available technology. Take artificial intelligence: The traditional paradigm might call for relying solely on one’s supply chain vendor for that. Maley says operators must be able to access experiments with outside ecosystems.

“You've got to have IP and solutions that give you access to that outside world, so you can provide the workflow and the customer satisfaction levels that you need in order to win business.” 

Maley calls this opening up “interoperability.” It provides flexibility and agility, and enables customers to test innovations other vendors bring to the marketplace. “You need to able to integrate fast with new technology and do that on your own, and not have to rely on either the automation vendor or your WMS vendor.”