January 23, 2025 • 39 mins
With over 80% of comprehension being visual, effective 3D design tools are essential for helping all manner of stakeholders identify risks early and create systems that prioritize people.
This week, host Ellen Wood is joined by Rich Trahey, VP Global Sales & Marketing at Configura, and Claire Konz, Supply Chain Consultant at Miebach Consulting Group, to explore how Configura Extension Technology (CET) is revolutionizing system design. By streamlining the process and making it accessible to all team members, CET enables engineers, operators, and other stakeholders to collaborate effortlessly from concept to completion.
Join us as we discuss:
This week, host Ellen Wood is joined by Rich Trahey, VP Global Sales & Marketing at Configura, and Claire Konz, Supply Chain Consultant at Miebach Consulting Group, to explore how Configura Extension Technology (CET) is revolutionizing system design. By streamlining the process and making it accessible to all team members, CET enables engineers, operators, and other stakeholders to collaborate effortlessly from concept to completion.
Join us as we discuss:
- Centering people in the visual design process from start to finish
- Reducing risks and technical errors through real-time visual engineering
- Supporting sustainable decision-making with smarter, greener solutions
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meeboch podcast.
This is a show for logistics professionals looking to learn
more about the latest innovations in supply chain. Each episode
will feature a conversation on topics such as mitigating supply
chain disruption and reducing risk, current automation trends, sustainability initiatives,
and more. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. Over the
past fifteen years, technical advancements have significantly transformed the design
and optimization of production and distribution facilities. System design has
become a pivotal tool enabling manufacturers to create detailed virtual
(00:55):
models of their operations and allows for a comprehensive analysis
and optimization of facility layouts before physical implementation. Joining me
today to discuss some of the various benefits offered by
such system design tools is Rich Trahey, vice president of
global sales for Configure Up.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Welcome, Thank you for having me, Ellen, I appreciate being here.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And one of my meebok colleagues Claire cons who is
one of the users of this tool for our organization, Claia,
Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Great to be here and thanks Ellen.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Let's get into our discussion for today, which is talking
about system design tools and specifically the configure A tool. Obviously,
so some of the things that we had discussed, so
we've already had a conversation earlier today about some of
the things that the tool can do, and we talked
with our team and it was a great informational exchange.
But for our listeners out there who are interested in
(01:52):
what this tool's capabilities are, some of the things that
we talked about very high level that the tool can benefits,
that it can provide risk reduction, cost efficiency, enhanced decision
making obviously, but also sustainability and just some benefits of
three D design. So let's start at the beginning, which
is risk reduction. That's the buzzword on everybody's mind right now.
(02:16):
Everyone wants to reduce the risk to their operations because
a few years ago we all remembered it. We've beat
it to death since then. But risks happen, and there
are frequently interruptions, disruptions to the supply chain, and to logistics.
What kind of risk are we able to reduce using
(02:38):
these particular tools when it comes to designing new facilities
or designing changes to existing facilities.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
So with a three D design tool such as a CET,
which is Configure Extension Technology, you've got two categories of risk, right,
business risk and technical risk. And the technical risk it
can come down to all the different systems that interchange
with each other, whether that is the equipment interfacing with
(03:08):
the building. So often you have just something as simple
as interferences that I didn't know that I column was there,
or oh, I didn't know that we have a utility
room in that section of the building design. So having
spatial design and knowing and being able to plan ahead
for those kind of tactical building interferences and that kind
of thing. And then you have technical exchanges between the
(03:29):
different equipments. And that's one of the reasons we created
the Extension platform is different manufacturers can publish their application
engineering extensions to the platform and then users can use
those different extensions together to make a system. So those
kind of on the technical side, that's a big huge
reduction in areas that you can see the real world
(03:50):
engineering in a very early stage of the concept. I'll
come back to business and maybe let Claire talk a
little bit about the technical risk management that comes with it.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
I think for me, and when it comes to risk management,
you also pull in some of those other things you
talked about, where you're looking at people centered design and
seeing how can we put together this design in a
way that makes sense. Right, So not only are you
eliminating actual physical risks such as like I column interference
or making sure there's an Egres path somewhere, but you're
(04:21):
also looking at, oh, this design doesn't quite make sense
in this space, or we can make this longer, or
we actually don't have as much space for this, racking
this ASRS something like that as we thought we did.
And so one of the things that has been a
huge benefit for us using Configure our CET as our
three D design tool has been the ability to sort
(04:42):
of have this immersive experience and see, oh, this fits here,
this doesn't fit here, you run a do a wall here,
there's actually not quite enough space for a staging lane here,
and being able to then put those different pieces together
in a way that kind of comes and brings it
to life.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
I'm going to expand on that a bit. So earlier
we were talking about alternative designs. So one business risk,
right is that you come up with a design and
the design is right, but maybe it wasn't the right design,
so like your technical risks are, there's no technical risks,
everything works, but it's not the best possible design, and
(05:18):
that you could call a business risk that like, hey, dang,
we launched this whole building, but oops, we picked the
wrong design. So a business risk is that you end
up with the wrong design because you didn't consider all
the alternatives. And maybe that was because of time, the
time that it takes to really weigh all the alternatives,
or you didn't have the framework set up with your
(05:40):
customer to be able to explore all those I know,
I've been in this situation where we were in crunch
time and we were as an integrator, went through seven
different scenarios and we picked the best one and put
it forward. Weren't able to really show those different scenarios
to the customer, really involve them all the stakeholders in
the business decisions and kind of uncover those things, you know,
(06:00):
collaborative design. So there's a real business risk there that's
very hard to articulate or write down in a spreadsheet,
But that's a risk that you picked the wrong design
in the big picture. So a tool like this that
helps you visualize and immerse yourself in the design and
really see the big picture and see quickly between different
alternatives both the technology and the costs help you make
(06:24):
the right choice.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
I had a very recent client that actually what we're
talking about all the different ways they could expand the
capacity of their building, and they were like, Okay, what
can you show us, What does it look like if
we add am asanine, What does it look like if
we change this that or the other thing about this design?
And we could actually show them.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Well, and one thing you mentioned a minute ago, Rich,
was that other suppliers, So the suppliers of these material
handling solutions are able to, you know, put their specs
into the configure a CET and so you can choose
different potential solutions to put into the design. Is that
(07:05):
eliminating some of this risk because you can look between
vendors to see which exact solution is going to fit
a little bit better or which exact if there's a
if there happens to be a preference on suppliers or
vendors that you're working with that you can switch those
out very easily and understand how that design can alter
(07:25):
even in those minuscule ways.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, I think there's in the big ways. Conceptually, you
might have technologies that are the heart of the solution
and you can speed up your conceptual design with let's
say there's this centerpiece of technology that changes the rest
of the solution and then be able to set up
an alternative with the centerpiece of technology that maybe is
the engine of the solution. And what's great about with
(07:51):
the extension technologies you're doing that with real manufacturers application
data if you're an integrator for example, or consultants such
as miboch, so you can way knowing that this is
real engineering application data, not just whiteboard sketching, but for
real technology. For sure, that's going to reduce a lot
of risk and speed things up when you go downstream
(08:12):
and start adding the fidelity to the design.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And that certainly increases the design's flexibility because when you
go to a particular vendor and say, you know, I'm
interested in your solution, they obviously will want to have
some sort of demonstration or proposal of what it would
look like in your facility, but they have their data.
They don't have their competitors design data that they can
put in there. And this allows you to really we're
(08:38):
doing a puzzle earlier, and you can switch out the
pieces and you can see how things are going to
fit together with a lot more flexibility because you have
all of those different pieces available inside the tool.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah. What a great analogy, right, because different people have
different ideas like, hey, maybe this subsystem could be this,
maybe this could be that, and everybody's kind of being
able to free wheel. I've been in a lot of
design reviews where that's a lot of fun, right, and
people get engaged and you get the positive energy of well,
what if we did this, and what if and what
if and what if? That can make for a very
positive design and then very quickly step back and see
(09:13):
the big picture. And with that alternative management, then way
the different alternatives against each other, like you said, with
real manufacturers equipment technology inside the solution.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Well, and that brings us into the next part of this,
which was the cost efficiency. That's going to be one
of those big factors that organizations are concerned about when
coming into a material, handling, purchase and integration is the cost.
So how does this particular tool help in terms of
(09:45):
making sure that these solutions are as efficient for the
finance department.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, so you have two aspects of that. One is
the investment itself, which is going to be the largest
cost efficiency you're working on is how to make sure
the design is cost efficient. And what this tool enables
you to do is not only like a traditional CAD
see the design, but this CAD or in this case
model has all the cost elements associated to those elements.
(10:16):
So if you are approved by that manufacturer to have
the cost information, manufacturers control that, they'll share that in
the model and then you can get live feedback on
the cost of that design. And that when we were
talking earlier about comparing alternatives, not only are you comparing, okay,
how many operators does this take, how much room does
this take? How efficient will in the flow be? But
(10:37):
you can live see the cost impact of those designs
as well. And the way we've done that in the
past that's really nice is to set up functional areas
and even see and structure your bill of material categorically
to say this functional area has this much investment. This
functional area has this much investment, and then you literally
can move your investment around within a design and say like, okay,
(10:57):
if we're doing a design to costs an aaria where
I'm trying to hit this x number of millions of dollars,
let's move that money around and see what we can
be most efficient and achieve the business goals with that money.
So for sure there's a cost effectiveness as well as
a cost efficiency. And then naturally on the efficiency of
the design itself, you have downstream gains using CET that
(11:20):
if you get your concept right with the original equipment,
the ramifications are that it's going to be much more efficient.
And many of our major integrators will save thirty to
forty percent in their engineering phases of the project when
they're using our software.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
That's pretty significant.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
As someone who uses the software. It is incredibly efficient
to be able to look at the different alternatives and
be able to incorporate costing into them. So we were
talking earlier about changing out the heart of the system
that you have right, so if you want to look
at a pickmod versus some kind of tope shuttle, you
can trade those out and have the different alternatives and
(11:57):
have the costs ready for those. We have a lot
of clients that request options for different budgets, so they'll say, Okay,
what's the option if we have this amount of budget
versus this amount, and what does that look like? What
can we get out of those different budgets and where
does it make sense to spend our money and to
have that hired capital investment at first? And then rich
(12:21):
you mentioned about the operational investment as well. With three
D design, it's a lot easier to visualize where your
people are going and what types of jobs they'll be
doing while they're there, so you can visualize where they
fit into the system and kind of approximate how many
people you'll need to do those different jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
What about the way that the systems work together once
they're installed. I know we've talked about this in a
couple other podcasts where we're talking about having the right
data and having the systems talking to each other and
making sure you've got everything mapped and integrated perfectly. And
a lot of the time during those integrations with these
(13:02):
very technical installations, the biggest cost overrun is in change
orders and in delays or things that you didn't anticipate
just from the design, Does this help with any of
that risk?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Yeah, I think that because of the detail we can
get out of doing a three D design like this,
you're definitely managing the change orders that would be needed
for the design of the project. Right. Some of those
more technical things that convey our interconnections may be a
little bit trickier to see just from a model, But
when you're talking about the overall concept and where things
(13:37):
go and how many racks do you actually need, how
many uprights, how many beams, how many different shelving units,
all of these different factors that come in like a
component type sale, you can get that right much closer
by being able to visualize it very clearly and understanding
all of the things that go into designing the levels
(13:58):
of the racking or the full area of the pick
module or something like that.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Yeah, you can really tie together the two conversations. Change
management not only is a cost management issue, but it's
really a risk management issue. Anytime you have a change
in a project. For sure, there's going to be some
incremental costs, but the big risk is that go live date.
Nobody wants to move that. So you have these changes,
so you kind of squeeze them in keep your schedule
(14:25):
the same, and there's a big risk there. I would
say I would make the venture. Most big changes in
material handling projects are the material to be handled. Right,
you're in the middle of a big project. Your customer
just happened to close the acquisition of another division, and
guess what we need to now incorporate all those skews
(14:46):
into the design. So not only do you have okay
the material they are handled, maybe we have to check
all those things, but also there's some material flow that
might need to change. But with CET, you can look
at what is the material to be handled. You've defined
all of that inside let's say a racking, and you
can say, okay, cool, we need to actually change a
few of the layers. And there's so many tools inside
(15:06):
of CET to make those things efficient where you also
can visualize and talk to your customers about those fast decisions. Okay,
you know now it was seventy two high. Now we
have ninety six inch high pallets. So let's change a
couple of things in the rack design. Quick check the
designs visually, make sure everyon's on the same page. There's
just a lot of tools to see change when you're
moving fast and do that review process to not only
(15:30):
keep that cost in check, but more importantly manage that
risk because that's the big fears that you're making changes
quickly and the temptation to skip over check steps is there.
And the visualization tool helps you communicate with all your stakeholders. Hey,
is this the change we're talking about? Okay, let's be
clear on scope.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I love that you talked about seeing change quickly because
that is one of the biggest benefits that we have
when talking to our clients and to our customers where
we're showing them these three D designs, is they want
to be able to understand what does this actually look like,
what does it actually do? And a good example of
this is actually racking and those elevations that you have.
(16:14):
If you're looking at it on a two D drawing,
you can only see from the top down, so you're
just seeing where the racking sits. But it's a lot
more difficult or you have to seek out and find
information in addition to your overhead view to understand that
this is five levels high or six levels high, or
there's seventy two inch pallets here in ninety six here,
(16:35):
and so there's a lot of changes there that you
just can't see in a two D overhead view.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I read a book once on I think it was
all about like how to make really compelling graphs and
chart turn your data into visuals. And I think it
was that book that said, like eighty three percent of
comprehension is visual. So even if you try to communicate
something right in like bill of material whatever, you have
to visualize it to really comprehend what's happening. And so
(17:02):
much of that is okay, it's on the surface, it's visual,
but it's our comprehension. And that's how you know, like
we're having clear communication and expectation management is when I
can visualize what you're talking about, not just the equipment,
but often also the tool set up, being like here's
what your operator is going to do, here's the process,
and we make visual flythroughs to show you, like the
(17:22):
life of an order, what a powerful tool that is.
To be able to say, like here's your orders coming
in the building or your inventory, and here's the life
of that order as it walks through. Super powerful tool set.
To be able to really walk a customer through understanding
how they're going to run their operation well.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
And that is an excellent point when it comes to
our next aspect, which is the enhanced decision making. So
a lot of people don't have that ability to imagine
in their minds when they hear you know, you're going
to have the structure it's five units high or whatever
and ten units long. They can't perceive that in their space.
(17:58):
It's a difficult thing to do to think in that way.
And so this helps that decision making for those who
need a little bit more with that design, with that
fly through. So what else can it do to help
with that decision for those stakeholders.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
I think that the example you brought up Ellen of
just kind of getting everyone on the same page and
what Rich talked about of just understanding and comprehending the
same design. I think we've all seen that picture of
the tire swing, where there's different iterations of the tire
swing based on how it was described to sales versus
the engineering team versus what the customer actually wanted. And
(18:40):
I think that's a great example of how things can
get lost in translation when you're just talking through them verbally, right,
but when you're using that power of visualization to be
able to get everyone on the same page and align.
It really helps understand what is going on in the system,
where things are sitting, how they interface with other areas
(19:03):
of the building, and that gives you a much more
people focused design.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, and you can take all the different user personas
for a system. Right, I'll give three examples. The first
one is the operators that are on the equipment. Right,
you can go immerse yourself, you can do it with
three D goggles, you can do it when you're in
your design reviews, but really just experiencing like, Okay, this
is what this person's work environment's going to be, and
this is what their operation is going to be. And
then of course egress is a very big deal to know,
(19:30):
like okay, how are they going to move around within
the plant or are they going to go on break?
How are they going to get out of there if
there's so fire a drill or a real fire. So
the operator and just their work environment. But then when
you're further down, typically you don't do this early in
the design stages, but later in the design stages you
want to know what does it take to maintain that equipment?
Can I access that motor, maybe I need to do
(19:52):
a slightly different motor mount or can I do the
maintenance on that shuttle system? How am I going to
get to that? And those are the things that really
matter when it comes down to you know, whether it's
a Black Friday or Christmas weekend and it's crunch time.
Everybody knows that's when uptime matters because you are cranking
that system as hard as you can to get as
(20:12):
much throughpit as you can, and that's when stuff goes
down and it's most critical to get in there and
access it well and fix it. So those are the
reasons why design teams and bring in multi stakeholders to
do those kind of assessments. And it's so much easier
in a three D environment. So making that decision of like, Okay,
what kind of conveyors should go here, what kind of
(20:33):
automation could go here, how much clearance do we need?
There's a cost trade off, we're going to need more
building space, or what can we do? So all those things,
those decision points are enhanced. And the third person or
user persona I'll throw out there for operating warehouse is
the supervisors. The supervisors become the lifeblood. I've been on
lots of tours of warehouses, I'm sure you both have,
(20:55):
and you know, a great tour is done by a
supervisor who operation and I've been on somewhere like you
kind of can't really tell what's going on, and I've
been on others. Will they bring you first to the
control tower, control room And I love a design when
you can design that control tower control room where you
can see the whole operation. Maybe they have their video
(21:16):
screens and everything too, but it's set up where you
can see the heartbeat of operation. Typically like your pick
stations are set your control tower, supervisor tower is there.
Maybe there's multiple, but that's a real big deal, so
that they can make live decisions, see reality, see their videos,
see their monitors. But I think that's a real critical
piece to any real well designed warehouse, as you've thought through,
(21:38):
where am my line supervisor is going to be able
to sit and be able to access their people and
work with them as a team to clear any kind
of issues that come up during the day of an operation.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
That is a great lead into this next point, which
is another decision that businesses are facing more and more often,
is sustainability. Practices and where they can improve their own sustainability.
We've talked about it in a few other episodes where
we talk about upstream and downstream and where that sustainability
is going to fall in terms of responsibility. But what
(22:13):
can this particular software do that is enabling companies to
make more sustainable choices.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah, so that really depends on the manufacturer. Some manufacturers,
and we're in multiple different industries with our tools, but
our engine is not only a visual design engine, it's
a calculation engine. So any calculation you can do, you
can do within our software, and some of our manufacturers
will do electrical calculations load calculations within the software, so
(22:44):
you can set up your system where you can calculate
electrical loads, so you could calculate the ampriage draw of
equipment the way that it's configured, and then you could
take that into consideration as a design I'll be honest,
like ours, which is generic equipment, we don't have that yet.
Integrated could be something we look at in the future,
(23:05):
but that's certainly something that can be done, and manufacturers
can incorporate that data into their metadata for their models,
so that that can be a decision point on how
to optimize amber straw. I know it's kind of something
that's very difficult to do early stages, so it's a
problem I'm not sure that industry solve, but we're ready
for the challenge if there's some manufacturers who are looking
(23:26):
to do that.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I think from an overall design perspective, when you are
looking at testing, how does a newer, more sustainable solution
fit into our building or our design right? How can
we see what it's going to look like before we
actually have it. Maybe it's something that's a little bit
more innovative, or a newer way to apply a solution,
or a new iteration of how something is built. One
(23:50):
thing that comes to mind is that there's a Meebok
client that actually has a wooden ASRS and being able
to see, okay, what does that look like if it's
not a conventional material, or we're using this new approach
to it and having the power to be able to say,
this is what the design is, this is what it
looks like, and be able to get into those nitty
(24:11):
gritty details for something that may be a novel concept.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I think I got to follow up with you later
on that that sounds very interesting. Would an ASRS That
sounds really intriguing.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So we've heard a lot of these benefits. Would Claire,
what would you consider the main benefit to be using
this particular tool. You've talked about many clients that you've
served with it and used this as part of your design.
So what is the main benefit that you feel and
what are you hearing from your clients.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
So we touched on this a little bit earlier, but
one of the biggest questions we get when we're in
this concepting phase is how does this affect me? Right?
So from our upper level, the people who are going
to be signing the checks, they're saying, Okay, how much
does it cost? Right? This tool can help answer that question.
And when we're talking to operators and people who are
an integral part of the stakeholders for these designs, they
(25:08):
want to understand what does this work environment look like,
how is it going to work, how am I going
to get from here to here? And what does that
mean for my job? Right? And so I think the
biggest thing this does is using that power of visual
communication to be able to answer those questions more intuitively
and quickly. Because we can walk through the life cycle
(25:29):
of a product. We can walk through a workstation and
how it's laid out, how it's designed, and we can
sort of track all of these materials through the building
to understand how it all comes together. Rich.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
What's your feedback been from clients or other agencies like
Mieback who utilize this particular tool to help their clients.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, I think there's some There's like the excitement factor,
and then there's the business ROI factor. So I'll talk
about the excitement factor first. Everybody loves to have a
customer engaged in the design process. So I've talked to
many customers I think mean back. I'll let Claire comment
if this is true for you or not, but like
(26:11):
their customers also tell them. I'm thinking of different integrators
who use our tools as say, Man, they love live
design sessions. Yes, they love to feel like they're part
of the design that like, it's not like, Okay, we
have a meeting, we talk about some things in power Point,
you take down a whole bunch of notes and then
at the end you say, like, okay, let's schedule to
(26:32):
get back together. And it's probably going to take us
a couple of weeks to make these changes, right, That's
like the not so old school way of doing it.
Most people probably still do it that way as opposed
to let's do a design session and we're changing the design,
live with them and they can see the changes happening.
Now your customers have their fingerprints on it, and the
(26:53):
stakeholders can say like, yeah, I want to see it
like that. I want to see it like that. Oh no,
that was a mistake. You can save two, three, four iterations.
I mean, really, it's all about engagement and iterative designs.
I'm a big believer and like, you shouldn't name that
tune in one note. You should iterate right to really
get a good design. I loved would taking an art
class when I was much much younger and learning that
(27:15):
the masters like their backgrounds. They would paint over them
like three, four, five times to get them right. And
like they've done this with like X ray analysis, like,
well there's four paintings there. They didn't get it right
the first time, even the masters right. So I think
iteration and design should be something we embrace and we
speed up right, and we get the stakeholders there to
(27:36):
see it and speed up. So I think that's like
the exciting part why people get super excited about CET.
That's that part that's flashy. And then the ROI part
is the accuracy of exchanging like, Okay, my concept is engineered,
so it's the real solution, which means when I go
and say like okay, cool, we're going to go forward
(27:57):
with this project, and you then move into your engineering
stone age, it's accurate. You don't have to re engineer things, right,
it's the real solution. So that's your big ROI benefit.
And then there's all kinds of benefits of eliminating errors.
Our software connects with ERP, it's got the full bill
of material and that bill of material is often integrated
right to order systems. So you really streamline the entire
(28:20):
process by making that powerful early stage concept with the
real design and then it flows right into ERP systems,
eliminating errors all the way throughout. So that's really on
the manufacturer side that streamlines for everybody. That basically what
you're talking about is aligning your stakeholder expectations to what
you deliver.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
All right, well, let's talk a little bit about the
future of our industry, and that is the workforce and
the labor issue that logistics companies are facing all across
the country, all around the world, and that is there's
a labor shortage and we were struggling to fill positions.
So how is this helping to make these facilities, these
(29:05):
warehouses a more attractive environment to work in. I mean,
obviously the people doing the designing find it attractive, but
what is it doing for those ground floor operators?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, I think I'll let Claire talk to how much
your customers talk about this issue of turnover. But I
think we were talking this morning about a stat from
the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. It was like and
we weren't sure if it was high enough, but they
said forty nine percent turnover. So even if you thought
about a normal business, right like I think, you know,
a normal business might be seven, eight, nine, ten percent,
(29:36):
warehouses have at least forty nine percent turnover. I've talked
to people in warehouses where they have like two hundred
percent turnover. I've been to warehouses where they were interviewing
one hundred people that day for warehouse positions. Right, there's
a warehouse with like a thousand people. But it's like
that indicated to me like they must have a big
turnover here. So it's a big, big topic and one
(29:58):
of the things we advocate for. It's like, can we
all get together and just agree, as the warehouse design community,
we need to do better. We owe it to those
people to make these warehouses more enjoyable to work in.
When we're doing cost optimization, Let's consider the warehouse staff
and the team that's there is like, they're got to
work here every day. Let's make this place beautiful. What's
(30:18):
wrong with that? Why can't we we use that language.
Let's put beauty into these warehouse designs. They don't have
to be all cold and gray and dungeony. Let's put
some nice lighting in. Let's consider that somebody's going to
work here for eight, maybe even ten hours a day,
so let's make it a beautiful space. And I think
a software like this can make that happen.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Yeah. I think this brings a really great perspective from
the interior design side as well, right, because you have
all of the tools right there at your fingertips to
be able to apply a lot of those interior design
principles and components and things like that to a warehouse,
where typically when we're designing a warehouse, we're like Okay, well,
what does all the conveyor do, what does all of
(30:59):
the robotic do, and all of these different aspects, right,
and when we're talking about people or we're talking about
how many people do I need? Where are they going
to stand? But being able to then also incorporate what
is their job going to be, like, what is their
day to day going to do? And how is that
going to feel for them? What is that going to
be when they are actually doing the job is a
(31:20):
game changer. And being able to reduce that huge turnover.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
That we're talking about, Yeah, what would the impact be
if you went from forty nine percent to twenty nine
percent or thirty percent or ten percent. Wouldn't that be
awesome if we were like, hey, this is a cool
place to work, I like it here, this looks and
feels right or whatever, all of those kind of people
centric like a true people centric design would take that
into consideration.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
We were talking earlier about how that could be difficult
to quantify the actual impact of that, but OPX is
one of the biggest costs of an operation. It's not
just the capital investment, but how much do you have
to spend on lead work and all of these different things.
So being able to reduce the hiring costs and having
(32:05):
to retrain people and all those different aspects that go
into bringing in new talent would be huge.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Well, and Claire, you were mentioning earlier a little bit
about some of the ergonomics of the work areas and
making sure that things are accessible and that you know,
it's not inordinate amount of steps from spot A to
spot B, and so that not only speaks to the
labor workforce that has to be there in those positions,
but also the safety of those employees, and you know
(32:35):
that the health of those employees that these companies are
having to subsidize and control those costs as well.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
One of the phrases I use a lot when I'm
talking about doing three D design is being able to
look at the spatial orientation of everything and how you
can sort of position the little camera, the little viewport
so you can be like you're almost in the design
right and so you get a good understanding of how
one thing compares to another. And one of the ways
(33:03):
you can do that is by dropping a little person
in that is next to a workstation or next to
your conveyor, or in your pick shelving things like that
and making sure, Okay, this does look like it's a
reasonable height for someone to be able to reach up
and grab, or this is probably something that someone's gonna
have to bend down to put all of these different
boxes onto the conveyor or something like that. So you
(33:26):
can look at the ergonomic aspects of that and try
to get those in that sort of golden zone where
you're not having to do a ton of bending and
stretching and twisting and all of those different ergonomic things
that lead to those long term injuries.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So getting back to just the tool itself and the
company can figure a There was a conference a few
months ago that you had and there was a contest
as part of the conference for some of the best
video outputs from this tool. So Rich talk to us
a little bit about how that came about and why
(34:03):
the need for a contest or why the desire for
a contest.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Oh, great question. So we've had the Experience Conference, which
was in October, it'll be in October next year. We
hosted that in Grand Rapids. It'll be in Orlando in
twenty twenty five. So I encourage all the listeners to
check that out. You can go to cet Experience dot com.
But the contest, I think is about celebrating our users, right.
That conference is all about the entire community getting together,
(34:29):
and we have many different people that are part of
the community, but the heart of it is the users,
and our users create such beautiful designs, so it's really
it's a user submission contests, and then users vote on
each other. It's like, hey, that looks cool. So it's
really about inspiring each other. I mean, that's why most
conferences exist, to kind of learn from each other and
(34:50):
be inspired by each other and encourage I'm like, what,
I didn't even know that was possible. How can you
do that? Right? You want to just open people's minds,
So I think the contest is a great way to
do that and celebrate the good work that's being done
out there. We've had it for quite a while on
the commercial interior side of things, and there's some amazing
renderings of interior design. And this year we launched the
(35:11):
material handling part of the competition, and I was very
pleased when I was there to see Claire was the
winner of that award, the material handling rendering, and it
was inspiration we had a lot of different submissions and
people in that competition, but that's really what it's all about,
is inspiring each other, like, look what you can do. Look,
you don't have to look at a two D layout anymore.
(35:32):
You can really see what almost looks like reality to
help your customers envision their futures, imagine the new. That's
what we say, I can figure out.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So, Claire, tell us a little bit about your submission.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
Yeah, So my submission was of automated pack line, I believe,
and kind of the warehousing that was behind it. But
I think one of the things that that entire conference
and that competition in particular really spoke to is what
I submitted was actually one of the first drawings I
ever did in Configure up. And so just the speed
to being able to learn the software and be able
(36:05):
to use it and make something that is very visually
focused and easy to understand and something that other people
can look at and say, Okay, yes this makes sense.
I understand how this system works. I really like how
this all comes together in this image. Things like that,
because this was voted on by industry peers, right, So
(36:26):
being able to do all of that with one of
my first drawings ever and have that come together so
quickly was really cool and I think speaks to the
easy use of the software and the people centric design
of configure up in particular.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So, now that you've had a little more practice with it,
is next year's contest a shoe in or do you
feel like there's going to be some good competition out there?
Speaker 4 (36:51):
I'm hoping we can take some good competition just from
me bok.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
That's great, well, Rich, it sounds like you are to
have a lot of submissions to review next year, and
hopefully our listeners out there are intrigued enough to add
to that number.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Awesome. I'm looking forward to it. I love seeing all
the different winners are not they're every single one of them.
Was pretty impressive.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
Yeah, because you can go back through and be like, wait,
how did you do that? I've never seen that before
and I actually did that with one of the other
people that submitted too, So.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, that's a great way to utilize the contest is
to highlight some of the things and the capabilities that
the tool enables, but also that mind to mind and
meeting of minds with the other users to help Oh
how do you do that? I love this. I want
to use that in my next one, and really building
that community of users that help each other get better
(37:51):
as the tool evolves and as your user maturity evolves.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, we actually had a really big uptick this year
in our material handling track, so all of the speaking
engagements that we had guest speakers, and I think we
struck the balance right. You're always nervous about asking people
to come and talk about their subject matter expertise, like, Okay,
nobody wants to share any of their trade secrets. But
I think we were able to achieve that where people
were able to really be candid share their best practice
(38:19):
while also keeping the proprietary information proprietary. And it was
super encouraging to see so many people sharing with each other.
I learned in every single session that I went to,
we had a good seventy eight nine I think maybe
ten specific material handling tracks was really solid awesome.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode.
A very special thank you to Claire and Rich for
all of your insights today. If any of our listeners
out there have a suggestion for a topic or would
like to be a guest on the show, we'd love
to hear from you. You can contact me at podcast
at mebok dot com at any time. As always, thank
(38:56):
you for listening to Speaking of Supply Chain. If you've
enjoyed the show, please raise and review us on whatever
podcast platform you prefer. We're on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music,
and Spotify, and be sure to tune in next time.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Meeboch Consulting is one of the largest and most globally
recognized supply chain consulting, engineering and advisory firms. For nearly
fifty years, we've helped clients achieve supply chain excellence and
sustainable competitive advantage across the entire spectrum of the supply
chain by delivering improvements and innovation strategically, tactically, and digitally.
(39:34):
To learn more, visit meeboch dot com. You've been listening
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the show that helps us to keep delivering the latest
in supply chain information. Thanks for listening. Until next time.
You're listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meeboch podcast.
This is a show for logistics professionals looking to learn
more about the latest innovations in supply chain. Each episode
will feature a conversation on topics such as mitigating supply
chain disruption and reducing risk, current automation trends, sustainability initiatives,
and more. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. Over the
past fifteen years, technical advancements have significantly transformed the design
and optimization of production and distribution facilities. System design has
become a pivotal tool enabling manufacturers to create detailed virtual
(00:55):
models of their operations and allows for a comprehensive analysis
and optimization of facility layouts before physical implementation. Joining me
today to discuss some of the various benefits offered by
such system design tools is Rich Trahey, vice president of
global sales for Configure Up.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Welcome, Thank you for having me, Ellen, I appreciate being here.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And one of my meebok colleagues Claire cons who is
one of the users of this tool for our organization, Claia,
Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Great to be here and thanks Ellen.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Let's get into our discussion for today, which is talking
about system design tools and specifically the configure A tool. Obviously,
so some of the things that we had discussed, so
we've already had a conversation earlier today about some of
the things that the tool can do, and we talked
with our team and it was a great informational exchange.
But for our listeners out there who are interested in
(01:52):
what this tool's capabilities are, some of the things that
we talked about very high level that the tool can benefits,
that it can provide risk reduction, cost efficiency, enhanced decision
making obviously, but also sustainability and just some benefits of
three D design. So let's start at the beginning, which
is risk reduction. That's the buzzword on everybody's mind right now.
(02:16):
Everyone wants to reduce the risk to their operations because
a few years ago we all remembered it. We've beat
it to death since then. But risks happen, and there
are frequently interruptions, disruptions to the supply chain, and to logistics.
What kind of risk are we able to reduce using
(02:38):
these particular tools when it comes to designing new facilities
or designing changes to existing facilities.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
So with a three D design tool such as a CET,
which is Configure Extension Technology, you've got two categories of risk, right,
business risk and technical risk. And the technical risk it
can come down to all the different systems that interchange
with each other, whether that is the equipment interfacing with
(03:08):
the building. So often you have just something as simple
as interferences that I didn't know that I column was there,
or oh, I didn't know that we have a utility
room in that section of the building design. So having
spatial design and knowing and being able to plan ahead
for those kind of tactical building interferences and that kind
of thing. And then you have technical exchanges between the
(03:29):
different equipments. And that's one of the reasons we created
the Extension platform is different manufacturers can publish their application
engineering extensions to the platform and then users can use
those different extensions together to make a system. So those
kind of on the technical side, that's a big huge
reduction in areas that you can see the real world
(03:50):
engineering in a very early stage of the concept. I'll
come back to business and maybe let Claire talk a
little bit about the technical risk management that comes with it.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
I think for me, and when it comes to risk management,
you also pull in some of those other things you
talked about, where you're looking at people centered design and
seeing how can we put together this design in a
way that makes sense. Right, So not only are you
eliminating actual physical risks such as like I column interference
or making sure there's an Egres path somewhere, but you're
(04:21):
also looking at, oh, this design doesn't quite make sense
in this space, or we can make this longer, or
we actually don't have as much space for this, racking
this ASRS something like that as we thought we did.
And so one of the things that has been a
huge benefit for us using Configure our CET as our
three D design tool has been the ability to sort
(04:42):
of have this immersive experience and see, oh, this fits here,
this doesn't fit here, you run a do a wall here,
there's actually not quite enough space for a staging lane here,
and being able to then put those different pieces together
in a way that kind of comes and brings it
to life.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
I'm going to expand on that a bit. So earlier
we were talking about alternative designs. So one business risk,
right is that you come up with a design and
the design is right, but maybe it wasn't the right design,
so like your technical risks are, there's no technical risks,
everything works, but it's not the best possible design, and
(05:18):
that you could call a business risk that like, hey, dang,
we launched this whole building, but oops, we picked the
wrong design. So a business risk is that you end
up with the wrong design because you didn't consider all
the alternatives. And maybe that was because of time, the
time that it takes to really weigh all the alternatives,
or you didn't have the framework set up with your
(05:40):
customer to be able to explore all those I know,
I've been in this situation where we were in crunch
time and we were as an integrator, went through seven
different scenarios and we picked the best one and put
it forward. Weren't able to really show those different scenarios
to the customer, really involve them all the stakeholders in
the business decisions and kind of uncover those things, you know,
(06:00):
collaborative design. So there's a real business risk there that's
very hard to articulate or write down in a spreadsheet,
But that's a risk that you picked the wrong design
in the big picture. So a tool like this that
helps you visualize and immerse yourself in the design and
really see the big picture and see quickly between different
alternatives both the technology and the costs help you make
(06:24):
the right choice.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
I had a very recent client that actually what we're
talking about all the different ways they could expand the
capacity of their building, and they were like, Okay, what
can you show us, What does it look like if
we add am asanine, What does it look like if
we change this that or the other thing about this design?
And we could actually show them.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Well, and one thing you mentioned a minute ago, Rich,
was that other suppliers, So the suppliers of these material
handling solutions are able to, you know, put their specs
into the configure a CET and so you can choose
different potential solutions to put into the design. Is that
(07:05):
eliminating some of this risk because you can look between
vendors to see which exact solution is going to fit
a little bit better or which exact if there's a
if there happens to be a preference on suppliers or
vendors that you're working with that you can switch those
out very easily and understand how that design can alter
(07:25):
even in those minuscule ways.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, I think there's in the big ways. Conceptually, you
might have technologies that are the heart of the solution
and you can speed up your conceptual design with let's
say there's this centerpiece of technology that changes the rest
of the solution and then be able to set up
an alternative with the centerpiece of technology that maybe is
the engine of the solution. And what's great about with
(07:51):
the extension technologies you're doing that with real manufacturers application
data if you're an integrator for example, or consultants such
as miboch, so you can way knowing that this is
real engineering application data, not just whiteboard sketching, but for
real technology. For sure, that's going to reduce a lot
of risk and speed things up when you go downstream
(08:12):
and start adding the fidelity to the design.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And that certainly increases the design's flexibility because when you
go to a particular vendor and say, you know, I'm
interested in your solution, they obviously will want to have
some sort of demonstration or proposal of what it would
look like in your facility, but they have their data.
They don't have their competitors design data that they can
put in there. And this allows you to really we're
(08:38):
doing a puzzle earlier, and you can switch out the
pieces and you can see how things are going to
fit together with a lot more flexibility because you have
all of those different pieces available inside the tool.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah. What a great analogy, right, because different people have
different ideas like, hey, maybe this subsystem could be this,
maybe this could be that, and everybody's kind of being
able to free wheel. I've been in a lot of
design reviews where that's a lot of fun, right, and
people get engaged and you get the positive energy of well,
what if we did this, and what if and what
if and what if? That can make for a very
positive design and then very quickly step back and see
(09:13):
the big picture. And with that alternative management, then way
the different alternatives against each other, like you said, with
real manufacturers equipment technology inside the solution.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Well, and that brings us into the next part of this,
which was the cost efficiency. That's going to be one
of those big factors that organizations are concerned about when
coming into a material, handling, purchase and integration is the cost.
So how does this particular tool help in terms of
(09:45):
making sure that these solutions are as efficient for the
finance department.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, so you have two aspects of that. One is
the investment itself, which is going to be the largest
cost efficiency you're working on is how to make sure
the design is cost efficient. And what this tool enables
you to do is not only like a traditional CAD
see the design, but this CAD or in this case
model has all the cost elements associated to those elements.
(10:16):
So if you are approved by that manufacturer to have
the cost information, manufacturers control that, they'll share that in
the model and then you can get live feedback on
the cost of that design. And that when we were
talking earlier about comparing alternatives, not only are you comparing, okay,
how many operators does this take, how much room does
this take? How efficient will in the flow be? But
(10:37):
you can live see the cost impact of those designs
as well. And the way we've done that in the
past that's really nice is to set up functional areas
and even see and structure your bill of material categorically
to say this functional area has this much investment. This
functional area has this much investment, and then you literally
can move your investment around within a design and say like, okay,
(10:57):
if we're doing a design to costs an aaria where
I'm trying to hit this x number of millions of dollars,
let's move that money around and see what we can
be most efficient and achieve the business goals with that money.
So for sure there's a cost effectiveness as well as
a cost efficiency. And then naturally on the efficiency of
the design itself, you have downstream gains using CET that
(11:20):
if you get your concept right with the original equipment,
the ramifications are that it's going to be much more efficient.
And many of our major integrators will save thirty to
forty percent in their engineering phases of the project when
they're using our software.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
That's pretty significant.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
As someone who uses the software. It is incredibly efficient
to be able to look at the different alternatives and
be able to incorporate costing into them. So we were
talking earlier about changing out the heart of the system
that you have right, so if you want to look
at a pickmod versus some kind of tope shuttle, you
can trade those out and have the different alternatives and
(11:57):
have the costs ready for those. We have a lot
of clients that request options for different budgets, so they'll say, Okay,
what's the option if we have this amount of budget
versus this amount, and what does that look like? What
can we get out of those different budgets and where
does it make sense to spend our money and to
have that hired capital investment at first? And then rich
(12:21):
you mentioned about the operational investment as well. With three
D design, it's a lot easier to visualize where your
people are going and what types of jobs they'll be
doing while they're there, so you can visualize where they
fit into the system and kind of approximate how many
people you'll need to do those different jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
What about the way that the systems work together once
they're installed. I know we've talked about this in a
couple other podcasts where we're talking about having the right
data and having the systems talking to each other and
making sure you've got everything mapped and integrated perfectly. And
a lot of the time during those integrations with these
(13:02):
very technical installations, the biggest cost overrun is in change
orders and in delays or things that you didn't anticipate
just from the design, Does this help with any of
that risk?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Yeah, I think that because of the detail we can
get out of doing a three D design like this,
you're definitely managing the change orders that would be needed
for the design of the project. Right. Some of those
more technical things that convey our interconnections may be a
little bit trickier to see just from a model, But
when you're talking about the overall concept and where things
(13:37):
go and how many racks do you actually need, how
many uprights, how many beams, how many different shelving units,
all of these different factors that come in like a
component type sale, you can get that right much closer
by being able to visualize it very clearly and understanding
all of the things that go into designing the levels
(13:58):
of the racking or the full area of the pick
module or something like that.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Yeah, you can really tie together the two conversations. Change
management not only is a cost management issue, but it's
really a risk management issue. Anytime you have a change
in a project. For sure, there's going to be some
incremental costs, but the big risk is that go live date.
Nobody wants to move that. So you have these changes,
so you kind of squeeze them in keep your schedule
(14:25):
the same, and there's a big risk there. I would
say I would make the venture. Most big changes in
material handling projects are the material to be handled. Right,
you're in the middle of a big project. Your customer
just happened to close the acquisition of another division, and
guess what we need to now incorporate all those skews
(14:46):
into the design. So not only do you have okay
the material they are handled, maybe we have to check
all those things, but also there's some material flow that
might need to change. But with CET, you can look
at what is the material to be handled. You've defined
all of that inside let's say a racking, and you
can say, okay, cool, we need to actually change a
few of the layers. And there's so many tools inside
(15:06):
of CET to make those things efficient where you also
can visualize and talk to your customers about those fast decisions. Okay,
you know now it was seventy two high. Now we
have ninety six inch high pallets. So let's change a
couple of things in the rack design. Quick check the
designs visually, make sure everyon's on the same page. There's
just a lot of tools to see change when you're
moving fast and do that review process to not only
(15:30):
keep that cost in check, but more importantly manage that
risk because that's the big fears that you're making changes
quickly and the temptation to skip over check steps is there.
And the visualization tool helps you communicate with all your stakeholders. Hey,
is this the change we're talking about? Okay, let's be
clear on scope.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I love that you talked about seeing change quickly because
that is one of the biggest benefits that we have
when talking to our clients and to our customers where
we're showing them these three D designs, is they want
to be able to understand what does this actually look like,
what does it actually do? And a good example of
this is actually racking and those elevations that you have.
(16:14):
If you're looking at it on a two D drawing,
you can only see from the top down, so you're
just seeing where the racking sits. But it's a lot
more difficult or you have to seek out and find
information in addition to your overhead view to understand that
this is five levels high or six levels high, or
there's seventy two inch pallets here in ninety six here,
(16:35):
and so there's a lot of changes there that you
just can't see in a two D overhead view.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I read a book once on I think it was
all about like how to make really compelling graphs and
chart turn your data into visuals. And I think it
was that book that said, like eighty three percent of
comprehension is visual. So even if you try to communicate
something right in like bill of material whatever, you have
to visualize it to really comprehend what's happening. And so
(17:02):
much of that is okay, it's on the surface, it's visual,
but it's our comprehension. And that's how you know, like
we're having clear communication and expectation management is when I
can visualize what you're talking about, not just the equipment,
but often also the tool set up, being like here's
what your operator is going to do, here's the process,
and we make visual flythroughs to show you, like the
(17:22):
life of an order, what a powerful tool that is.
To be able to say, like here's your orders coming
in the building or your inventory, and here's the life
of that order as it walks through. Super powerful tool set.
To be able to really walk a customer through understanding
how they're going to run their operation well.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
And that is an excellent point when it comes to
our next aspect, which is the enhanced decision making. So
a lot of people don't have that ability to imagine
in their minds when they hear you know, you're going
to have the structure it's five units high or whatever
and ten units long. They can't perceive that in their space.
(17:58):
It's a difficult thing to do to think in that way.
And so this helps that decision making for those who
need a little bit more with that design, with that
fly through. So what else can it do to help
with that decision for those stakeholders.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
I think that the example you brought up Ellen of
just kind of getting everyone on the same page and
what Rich talked about of just understanding and comprehending the
same design. I think we've all seen that picture of
the tire swing, where there's different iterations of the tire
swing based on how it was described to sales versus
the engineering team versus what the customer actually wanted. And
(18:40):
I think that's a great example of how things can
get lost in translation when you're just talking through them verbally, right,
but when you're using that power of visualization to be
able to get everyone on the same page and align.
It really helps understand what is going on in the system,
where things are sitting, how they interface with other areas
(19:03):
of the building, and that gives you a much more
people focused design.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, and you can take all the different user personas
for a system. Right, I'll give three examples. The first
one is the operators that are on the equipment. Right,
you can go immerse yourself, you can do it with
three D goggles, you can do it when you're in
your design reviews, but really just experiencing like, Okay, this
is what this person's work environment's going to be, and
this is what their operation is going to be. And
then of course egress is a very big deal to know,
(19:30):
like okay, how are they going to move around within
the plant or are they going to go on break?
How are they going to get out of there if
there's so fire a drill or a real fire. So
the operator and just their work environment. But then when
you're further down, typically you don't do this early in
the design stages, but later in the design stages you
want to know what does it take to maintain that equipment?
Can I access that motor, maybe I need to do
(19:52):
a slightly different motor mount or can I do the
maintenance on that shuttle system? How am I going to
get to that? And those are the things that really
matter when it comes down to you know, whether it's
a Black Friday or Christmas weekend and it's crunch time.
Everybody knows that's when uptime matters because you are cranking
that system as hard as you can to get as
(20:12):
much throughpit as you can, and that's when stuff goes
down and it's most critical to get in there and
access it well and fix it. So those are the
reasons why design teams and bring in multi stakeholders to
do those kind of assessments. And it's so much easier
in a three D environment. So making that decision of like, Okay,
what kind of conveyors should go here, what kind of
(20:33):
automation could go here, how much clearance do we need?
There's a cost trade off, we're going to need more
building space, or what can we do? So all those things,
those decision points are enhanced. And the third person or
user persona I'll throw out there for operating warehouse is
the supervisors. The supervisors become the lifeblood. I've been on
lots of tours of warehouses, I'm sure you both have,
(20:55):
and you know, a great tour is done by a
supervisor who operation and I've been on somewhere like you
kind of can't really tell what's going on, and I've
been on others. Will they bring you first to the
control tower, control room And I love a design when
you can design that control tower control room where you
can see the whole operation. Maybe they have their video
(21:16):
screens and everything too, but it's set up where you
can see the heartbeat of operation. Typically like your pick
stations are set your control tower, supervisor tower is there.
Maybe there's multiple, but that's a real big deal, so
that they can make live decisions, see reality, see their videos,
see their monitors. But I think that's a real critical
piece to any real well designed warehouse, as you've thought through,
(21:38):
where am my line supervisor is going to be able
to sit and be able to access their people and
work with them as a team to clear any kind
of issues that come up during the day of an operation.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
That is a great lead into this next point, which
is another decision that businesses are facing more and more often,
is sustainability. Practices and where they can improve their own sustainability.
We've talked about it in a few other episodes where
we talk about upstream and downstream and where that sustainability
is going to fall in terms of responsibility. But what
(22:13):
can this particular software do that is enabling companies to
make more sustainable choices.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah, so that really depends on the manufacturer. Some manufacturers,
and we're in multiple different industries with our tools, but
our engine is not only a visual design engine, it's
a calculation engine. So any calculation you can do, you
can do within our software, and some of our manufacturers
will do electrical calculations load calculations within the software, so
(22:44):
you can set up your system where you can calculate
electrical loads, so you could calculate the ampriage draw of
equipment the way that it's configured, and then you could
take that into consideration as a design I'll be honest,
like ours, which is generic equipment, we don't have that yet.
Integrated could be something we look at in the future,
(23:05):
but that's certainly something that can be done, and manufacturers
can incorporate that data into their metadata for their models,
so that that can be a decision point on how
to optimize amber straw. I know it's kind of something
that's very difficult to do early stages, so it's a
problem I'm not sure that industry solve, but we're ready
for the challenge if there's some manufacturers who are looking
(23:26):
to do that.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
I think from an overall design perspective, when you are
looking at testing, how does a newer, more sustainable solution
fit into our building or our design right? How can
we see what it's going to look like before we
actually have it. Maybe it's something that's a little bit
more innovative, or a newer way to apply a solution,
or a new iteration of how something is built. One
(23:50):
thing that comes to mind is that there's a Meebok
client that actually has a wooden ASRS and being able
to see, okay, what does that look like if it's
not a conventional material, or we're using this new approach
to it and having the power to be able to say,
this is what the design is, this is what it
looks like, and be able to get into those nitty
(24:11):
gritty details for something that may be a novel concept.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I think I got to follow up with you later
on that that sounds very interesting. Would an ASRS That
sounds really intriguing.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So we've heard a lot of these benefits. Would Claire,
what would you consider the main benefit to be using
this particular tool. You've talked about many clients that you've
served with it and used this as part of your design.
So what is the main benefit that you feel and
what are you hearing from your clients.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
So we touched on this a little bit earlier, but
one of the biggest questions we get when we're in
this concepting phase is how does this affect me? Right?
So from our upper level, the people who are going
to be signing the checks, they're saying, Okay, how much
does it cost? Right? This tool can help answer that question.
And when we're talking to operators and people who are
an integral part of the stakeholders for these designs, they
(25:08):
want to understand what does this work environment look like,
how is it going to work, how am I going
to get from here to here? And what does that
mean for my job? Right? And so I think the
biggest thing this does is using that power of visual
communication to be able to answer those questions more intuitively
and quickly. Because we can walk through the life cycle
(25:29):
of a product. We can walk through a workstation and
how it's laid out, how it's designed, and we can
sort of track all of these materials through the building
to understand how it all comes together. Rich.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
What's your feedback been from clients or other agencies like
Mieback who utilize this particular tool to help their clients.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, I think there's some There's like the excitement factor,
and then there's the business ROI factor. So I'll talk
about the excitement factor first. Everybody loves to have a
customer engaged in the design process. So I've talked to
many customers I think mean back. I'll let Claire comment
if this is true for you or not, but like
(26:11):
their customers also tell them. I'm thinking of different integrators
who use our tools as say, Man, they love live
design sessions. Yes, they love to feel like they're part
of the design that like, it's not like, Okay, we
have a meeting, we talk about some things in power Point,
you take down a whole bunch of notes and then
at the end you say, like, okay, let's schedule to
(26:32):
get back together. And it's probably going to take us
a couple of weeks to make these changes, right, That's
like the not so old school way of doing it.
Most people probably still do it that way as opposed
to let's do a design session and we're changing the design,
live with them and they can see the changes happening.
Now your customers have their fingerprints on it, and the
(26:53):
stakeholders can say like, yeah, I want to see it
like that. I want to see it like that. Oh no,
that was a mistake. You can save two, three, four iterations.
I mean, really, it's all about engagement and iterative designs.
I'm a big believer and like, you shouldn't name that
tune in one note. You should iterate right to really
get a good design. I loved would taking an art
class when I was much much younger and learning that
(27:15):
the masters like their backgrounds. They would paint over them
like three, four, five times to get them right. And
like they've done this with like X ray analysis, like,
well there's four paintings there. They didn't get it right
the first time, even the masters right. So I think
iteration and design should be something we embrace and we
speed up right, and we get the stakeholders there to
(27:36):
see it and speed up. So I think that's like
the exciting part why people get super excited about CET.
That's that part that's flashy. And then the ROI part
is the accuracy of exchanging like, Okay, my concept is engineered,
so it's the real solution, which means when I go
and say like okay, cool, we're going to go forward
(27:57):
with this project, and you then move into your engineering
stone age, it's accurate. You don't have to re engineer things, right,
it's the real solution. So that's your big ROI benefit.
And then there's all kinds of benefits of eliminating errors.
Our software connects with ERP, it's got the full bill
of material and that bill of material is often integrated
right to order systems. So you really streamline the entire
(28:20):
process by making that powerful early stage concept with the
real design and then it flows right into ERP systems,
eliminating errors all the way throughout. So that's really on
the manufacturer side that streamlines for everybody. That basically what
you're talking about is aligning your stakeholder expectations to what
you deliver.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
All right, well, let's talk a little bit about the
future of our industry, and that is the workforce and
the labor issue that logistics companies are facing all across
the country, all around the world, and that is there's
a labor shortage and we were struggling to fill positions.
So how is this helping to make these facilities, these
(29:05):
warehouses a more attractive environment to work in. I mean,
obviously the people doing the designing find it attractive, but
what is it doing for those ground floor operators?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, I think I'll let Claire talk to how much
your customers talk about this issue of turnover. But I
think we were talking this morning about a stat from
the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. It was like and
we weren't sure if it was high enough, but they
said forty nine percent turnover. So even if you thought
about a normal business, right like I think, you know,
a normal business might be seven, eight, nine, ten percent,
(29:36):
warehouses have at least forty nine percent turnover. I've talked
to people in warehouses where they have like two hundred
percent turnover. I've been to warehouses where they were interviewing
one hundred people that day for warehouse positions. Right, there's
a warehouse with like a thousand people. But it's like
that indicated to me like they must have a big
turnover here. So it's a big, big topic and one
(29:58):
of the things we advocate for. It's like, can we
all get together and just agree, as the warehouse design community,
we need to do better. We owe it to those
people to make these warehouses more enjoyable to work in.
When we're doing cost optimization, Let's consider the warehouse staff
and the team that's there is like, they're got to
work here every day. Let's make this place beautiful. What's
(30:18):
wrong with that? Why can't we we use that language.
Let's put beauty into these warehouse designs. They don't have
to be all cold and gray and dungeony. Let's put
some nice lighting in. Let's consider that somebody's going to
work here for eight, maybe even ten hours a day,
so let's make it a beautiful space. And I think
a software like this can make that happen.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Yeah. I think this brings a really great perspective from
the interior design side as well, right, because you have
all of the tools right there at your fingertips to
be able to apply a lot of those interior design
principles and components and things like that to a warehouse,
where typically when we're designing a warehouse, we're like Okay, well,
what does all the conveyor do, what does all of
(30:59):
the robotic do, and all of these different aspects, right,
and when we're talking about people or we're talking about
how many people do I need? Where are they going
to stand? But being able to then also incorporate what
is their job going to be, like, what is their
day to day going to do? And how is that
going to feel for them? What is that going to
be when they are actually doing the job is a
(31:20):
game changer. And being able to reduce that huge turnover.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
That we're talking about, Yeah, what would the impact be
if you went from forty nine percent to twenty nine
percent or thirty percent or ten percent. Wouldn't that be
awesome if we were like, hey, this is a cool
place to work, I like it here, this looks and
feels right or whatever, all of those kind of people
centric like a true people centric design would take that
into consideration.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
We were talking earlier about how that could be difficult
to quantify the actual impact of that, but OPX is
one of the biggest costs of an operation. It's not
just the capital investment, but how much do you have
to spend on lead work and all of these different things.
So being able to reduce the hiring costs and having
(32:05):
to retrain people and all those different aspects that go
into bringing in new talent would be huge.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Well, and Claire, you were mentioning earlier a little bit
about some of the ergonomics of the work areas and
making sure that things are accessible and that you know,
it's not inordinate amount of steps from spot A to
spot B, and so that not only speaks to the
labor workforce that has to be there in those positions,
but also the safety of those employees, and you know
(32:35):
that the health of those employees that these companies are
having to subsidize and control those costs as well.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
One of the phrases I use a lot when I'm
talking about doing three D design is being able to
look at the spatial orientation of everything and how you
can sort of position the little camera, the little viewport
so you can be like you're almost in the design
right and so you get a good understanding of how
one thing compares to another. And one of the ways
(33:03):
you can do that is by dropping a little person
in that is next to a workstation or next to
your conveyor, or in your pick shelving things like that
and making sure, Okay, this does look like it's a
reasonable height for someone to be able to reach up
and grab, or this is probably something that someone's gonna
have to bend down to put all of these different
boxes onto the conveyor or something like that. So you
(33:26):
can look at the ergonomic aspects of that and try
to get those in that sort of golden zone where
you're not having to do a ton of bending and
stretching and twisting and all of those different ergonomic things
that lead to those long term injuries.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So getting back to just the tool itself and the
company can figure a There was a conference a few
months ago that you had and there was a contest
as part of the conference for some of the best
video outputs from this tool. So Rich talk to us
a little bit about how that came about and why
(34:03):
the need for a contest or why the desire for
a contest.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
Oh, great question. So we've had the Experience Conference, which
was in October, it'll be in October next year. We
hosted that in Grand Rapids. It'll be in Orlando in
twenty twenty five. So I encourage all the listeners to
check that out. You can go to cet Experience dot com.
But the contest, I think is about celebrating our users, right.
That conference is all about the entire community getting together,
(34:29):
and we have many different people that are part of
the community, but the heart of it is the users,
and our users create such beautiful designs, so it's really
it's a user submission contests, and then users vote on
each other. It's like, hey, that looks cool. So it's
really about inspiring each other. I mean, that's why most
conferences exist, to kind of learn from each other and
(34:50):
be inspired by each other and encourage I'm like, what,
I didn't even know that was possible. How can you
do that? Right? You want to just open people's minds,
So I think the contest is a great way to
do that and celebrate the good work that's being done
out there. We've had it for quite a while on
the commercial interior side of things, and there's some amazing
renderings of interior design. And this year we launched the
(35:11):
material handling part of the competition, and I was very
pleased when I was there to see Claire was the
winner of that award, the material handling rendering, and it
was inspiration we had a lot of different submissions and
people in that competition, but that's really what it's all about,
is inspiring each other, like, look what you can do. Look,
you don't have to look at a two D layout anymore.
(35:32):
You can really see what almost looks like reality to
help your customers envision their futures, imagine the new. That's
what we say, I can figure out.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
So, Claire, tell us a little bit about your submission.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
Yeah, So my submission was of automated pack line, I believe,
and kind of the warehousing that was behind it. But
I think one of the things that that entire conference
and that competition in particular really spoke to is what
I submitted was actually one of the first drawings I
ever did in Configure up. And so just the speed
to being able to learn the software and be able
(36:05):
to use it and make something that is very visually
focused and easy to understand and something that other people
can look at and say, Okay, yes this makes sense.
I understand how this system works. I really like how
this all comes together in this image. Things like that,
because this was voted on by industry peers, right, So
(36:26):
being able to do all of that with one of
my first drawings ever and have that come together so
quickly was really cool and I think speaks to the
easy use of the software and the people centric design
of configure up in particular.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So, now that you've had a little more practice with it,
is next year's contest a shoe in or do you
feel like there's going to be some good competition out there?
Speaker 4 (36:51):
I'm hoping we can take some good competition just from
me bok.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
That's great, well, Rich, it sounds like you are to
have a lot of submissions to review next year, and
hopefully our listeners out there are intrigued enough to add
to that number.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Awesome. I'm looking forward to it. I love seeing all
the different winners are not they're every single one of them.
Was pretty impressive.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
Yeah, because you can go back through and be like, wait,
how did you do that? I've never seen that before
and I actually did that with one of the other
people that submitted too, So.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, that's a great way to utilize the contest is
to highlight some of the things and the capabilities that
the tool enables, but also that mind to mind and
meeting of minds with the other users to help Oh
how do you do that? I love this. I want
to use that in my next one, and really building
that community of users that help each other get better
(37:51):
as the tool evolves and as your user maturity evolves.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, we actually had a really big uptick this year
in our material handling track, so all of the speaking
engagements that we had guest speakers, and I think we
struck the balance right. You're always nervous about asking people
to come and talk about their subject matter expertise, like, Okay,
nobody wants to share any of their trade secrets. But
I think we were able to achieve that where people
were able to really be candid share their best practice
(38:19):
while also keeping the proprietary information proprietary. And it was
super encouraging to see so many people sharing with each other.
I learned in every single session that I went to,
we had a good seventy eight nine I think maybe
ten specific material handling tracks was really solid awesome.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode.
A very special thank you to Claire and Rich for
all of your insights today. If any of our listeners
out there have a suggestion for a topic or would
like to be a guest on the show, we'd love
to hear from you. You can contact me at podcast
at mebok dot com at any time. As always, thank
(38:56):
you for listening to Speaking of Supply Chain. If you've
enjoyed the show, please raise and review us on whatever
podcast platform you prefer. We're on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music,
and Spotify, and be sure to tune in next time.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Meeboch Consulting is one of the largest and most globally
recognized supply chain consulting, engineering and advisory firms. For nearly
fifty years, we've helped clients achieve supply chain excellence and
sustainable competitive advantage across the entire spectrum of the supply
chain by delivering improvements and innovation strategically, tactically, and digitally.
(39:34):
To learn more, visit meeboch dot com. You've been listening
to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meboch podcast, keep connected
with us by subscribing to the show in your favorite
podcast player. If you like what you've heard, please rate
the show that helps us to keep delivering the latest
in supply chain information. Thanks for listening. Until next time.
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