Robotic Warehouse
“We believe that the industry is ripe for disruption,” says TakeOff Technologies CEO and co-founder Jose Vicente Aguerrevere. That disruption Vicente Aguerrevere speaks of, is the automated grocery distribution market. The Boston area startup is revolutionizing so-called micro-fulfillment centers. These centers conduct orders and catering by automatically fulfilling requests directly within supermarkets. Developing a “robotic warehouse” within the stores individuals shop can make the food-to-table process faster than ever. The whole process is expected to need approximately only a half-an-hour lead time. The company announced a $12.5 million Series B rollout plan to launch in an unnamed supermarket in October. The Takeoff Technologies plans to utilize 10,000 square feet in it’s given 50,000-square-foot space. Leading competitors like CommonSense Robotics out of Israel, Instacart, AmazonFesh, Walmart, and Kroger also are aiming for highly efficient micro-fulfillment centers to roll out in the near future.
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Changing Air Freight
Dronamics, a Bulgarian company specializing in drone specialization, is developing a revolutionary pilotless air-freight system. While many industry leaders race to address the last-mile delivery problem, Dronamics is focused on long-haul freight. The company created a drone that will be able to carry up to 800 pounds over approximately 1,500 miles. The approach has the potential to radically transform the air freight industry. Currently, shipping by air is incredibly quick and convenient, but only takes up approximately 1% of global shipping by volume due to expense. Dronamics wants to carry small packages in large quantities cross-country. While doing so, they project their drone shipping costs to be 50 percent lower than a traditional cargo plane with a human pilot. To add to that, each drone is also expected to cost less than $100,000 dollars to produce, far less than the traditional cargo plane at $500,000, providing a long-term payoff. Is drone piloted air-freight the future of shipping? How will this affect the ground shipment industry?
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Gartner
The 2018 Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 is an amazing summary and recognition of industry leading supply chains. Most noteworthy, Unilever repeated as the number one supply chain for the third year in a row. Another big development is McDonald’s joining Apple, P&G and Amazon as the top supply chains in the “masters” category. The “masters” category is a nod to companies that have continually ranked as top supply chains over the past decade. Gartner also notes three key trends across the top supply chains; an increased focus on customer experience, the acceleration of supply chain digitization initiatives, and improved sustainability practices.
Read more here in Gartner’s press release. Also, see our case studies on how we helped a “masters” category supply chain solutions provider create their global transformation strategy and launch a global innovation program.