Warehouse practitioners are today challenged to design and deliver “good warehousing” in a current era of hyper-intensive and increasingly-complex customer behavior, respectively of pandemic-imposed remoteness. We are further challenged to define how “good” can warehousing get by means of technology, while keeping costs under control. And today there are so many technical choices for warehouse solutions to find in the market that the overview is getting hard to make. Same time suppliers push their solutions as best practice. We believe we can support you in making the right decisions for your business by asking and answering three key sets of questions:
1. Is it enough to be talking only about goods-to-person (GTP) automation? How can we leverage Industry 4.0 transformations, such as IOT, Robotics, Digital Twins and Machine Learning? Let’s discuss how GTP and I4.0 are complementary and drive value for your business.
2. Is it enough to be talking only about WMS (and corresponding upgrades)? Nowadays we also need to evaluate platforms such as WES (Warehouse Execution Systems) and new modular, significantly more agile WMS architectures based on micro computing.
3. Is it enough to talk only about hardware and software? That is in reality only half the “Transformation story”: the human factor needs to be taken into account, studying the concept of (digitalized) warehouse operator of the future: technology-augmented and data-driven.
These questions will be answered, by means of a completely new program, by two experts: Stefan Rusu (Johnson & Johnson, Neoma Business School - France & Rotterdam School of Management - Erasmus University) and Jan De Kimpe (PICS Belgium, Logisol Pro, ART4L and KULeuven).
The program includes, besides the lectures of these instructors, a robotics entrepreneur as guest speaker. The course also contains two facilitator-led breakout sessions, for which we invite you to bring your own challenges or ideas, from your industry and/or company - we will explore it together and discuss how they can best be addressed by means of the technologies introduced during the course, including criteria for and high-level and business case evaluation.
Finally, to conclude the proceedings, we bring you a quest of imagination and vision: how will warehousing look like in 2050? Allow us to set the scene and let's envision the future together. Why is this important now? Weighting all the emerging technologies, we need to start preparing soon for the long-term and thus invest time and attention in the short-term. (Most) Warehouse technologies have now reached proper and sustainable maturity for us to start trying them out – think big, start small, but start nonetheless.