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Imprisoned in silos
July 21, 2008
I just interviewed Leon McGinnis, a professor of manufacturing systems at Georgia Tech. I figured he’d be just the right person to talk about the future of materials handling for our September special issue on that topic. What he told me tells me this field has a lot of work to do.
He’s been waging a campaign to try to get the various material handling engineering disciplines to talk to each other using a standard engineering language. You mean they don’t, I asked? Apparently not. Not like all the disparate disciplines that contribute to the making of an integrated circuit.
“With an integrated circuit, whether you’re a transistor guy, a capacitor guy or a resister guy, you all draw the same schematic,” he told me. “With this schematic you have access to a bunch of tools that will do analysis for you and tell you how this thing’s working.”
In materials handling, he continued, we hire simulation experts who spend six weeks building a model. A new model gets reinvented with each project. The problem is, AGV people don’t speak the same language as AS/RS and robotics people. Time and money go out the window as a result of reinventing the wheel.
This sorry saga of specialty silos reminded me of a study AMR Research released a few months ago, in conjunction with a subgroup of the Supply Chain Council. They surveyed almost 200 organizations and learned that no two supply chains are alike. In fact, very few companies define the supply chain in the same way. The researchers concluded that this contributes significantly to a lack of clear priorities for standards and for consistent curriculum development at universities.
That’s a problem, considering there’s a trend toward a more centralized supply chain structure that demands managers have broader skillsets. Industries and academia need to adopt a shared, modern, comprehensive model that incorporates the growing depth and scope of the materials handling and logistics disciplines.
Clearly schools and employers need to collaborate as much as AGV and AS/RS specialists do. Schools need to provide more universal supply chain management skillsets while industry needs to offer internship opportunities for students to gain real-world exposure to how these technologies contribute to global supply chain flow.
Is your company part of the solution or part of the problem? Do you keep going back to the drawing board with each new project? Are you concerned about the talent pool available to manage your projects? Does your company open its doors to student interns? And if it does, have you hired them later? Give me your take on the future of materials handling and logistics at your company.
Posted by Tom Andel on July 21, 2008 | Comments (2)
In response to: Imprisoned in silos
John Hayes commented:
Here at HK Systems we manufacture both ASRS and AGVs so I see some of what Mr. McGinnis is referring to in this article. However, our industry and the equipment and tools we use are vastly different than the industry and the tools that Mr. McGinnis uses as to draw a comparison. I would say that within each individual section of material handling, say the AGV world, most if not all companies use the same terms and arrive at viable system solutions much the same way. I use AGVs because this is what I am most familiar with due to my background, but I would venture that ASRS and Conveyor vendors are much the same. The concept that Mr. McGinnis is putting forward makes sense, but the dynamics of each sub group in material handling are a bit different and may make it difficult to 'speak the same language'. On to Mr. Andel's point about interns. We are vey lucky here in the Charlotte NC area to have a very strong engineering school to draw from locally, UNC Charlotte. The interns that we use have provided us some fresh perspective and are well schooled and quite knowledgeable. Many of our most skilled engineers started as interns, some many years ago, and are still here working collaboratively on our team. I can not stress enough the benefit to our company that this flow of fresh ideas and new perspective brings to our company. It is also, I hope, beneficial to the intern and to the workforce as a whole.
In response to: Imprisoned in silos
Leon McGinnis commented:
John makes my point--within the AGV discipline today, there is a reasonably consistent "language", but the breakdown happens at the discipline boundaries, e.g., between the AGV discipline and the storage discipline or the order assembly discipline. The fact that within the warehousing domain we don't yet know how to "speak systems" doesn't mean we never can. It means that the time has come for the academic and practitioner communities to do the hard work of developing this language. The future costs of our failure to do so are simply no longer acceptable.