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Sean Wallingford is president of Warehouse Solutions North America for Vanderlande, overseeing the company’s portfolio of warehouse solutions and systems, intelligent software and lifecycle services. Prior to joining Vanderlande, Wallingford was vice president of product management for Intelligrated Software at Honeywell Intelligrated, where he previously served as the company’s senior director of strategic operations. Wallingford studied electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee and has a law degree from Northern Kentucky University.
Q: Where do you see the material handling market headed in 2022?
A: While the growth of e-commerce is nothing new, the pandemic will continue to accelerate its adoption. We will also see continued modernization of global supply chains, although many organizations face challenges such as labor shortages and raw material shortages, which will lead to increased lead times and costs. In many ways, 2022 will feel like a continuation of 2021 with the same trends impacting the materials handling market.
Q: What is the most significant change you have seen in your time in the industry?
A: North America is seeing a shift to the larger, more integrated and complex material handling systems already common in Europe, where the availability and cost of land and labor forced most warehouse operations to adopt automation years ago. Those same market drivers were much less pronounced here, but that’s changing as distribution centers find it challenging to fully staff their facilities and real estate values increase. The pandemic is accelerating this change.
The other significant change I’ve seen is the move to standardized and manufactured systems. Previously, the only “stringent” factor in designing and selling material handling systems was the imagination of sales engineers. This introduced a lot of risk and often led to long, overly complex implementations. Today, the industry is moving toward a more standardized approach that is still customizable for specific needs, while reducing time-to-commissioning and providing customers with tangible benefits and realistic expectations for performance, cost, and support.
Q: Vanderlande is already part of Toyota Advanced Logistics. What are the benefits for your customers of being part of the Toyota family?
A: Our customers rightly consider the manufacturing supply chain when investing in their material handling systems. Vanderlande is, of course, owned by the experts: Toyota invented lean manufacturing. In addition to access to their technologies, such as automated guided vehicles, we also benefit from their strong financial support. Our customers are investing in complex systems that will be used for many years to come, so having a partner with a solid financial foundation is important. We also continuously work with Toyota to improve our performance, response times and costs.
Q: Vanderlande is a full service solution provider. What are the advantages of working with a company with a wide range of systems and services?
A: To begin with, Vanderlande’s global reach is a significant advantage. With employees in 100 countries, we benefit from constant global feedback that often gives us advance notice of developing trends that will impact our customers. Usually, new problems in one area of the world have already been solved somewhere else, so we often have solutions that our teams can use immediately.
Offering a complete set of solutions is also very helpful. We don’t have to go outside Vanderlande for the main components used in our systems. This is a significant risk mitigation factor and one that allows us to ensure they are always performing at their peak without the finger pointing that can occur when using software and components that are not designed to work together.
Q: How can automation help solve the current warehouse labor crisis?
A: The labor crisis is real. Most material handling operations today struggle to fully staff their facilities. Automation helps and is critical because it allows distribution centers to reallocate people to the more complex tasks and roles that exist in all warehouses. It’s also important to use automation to take on the toughest jobs—for example, those associated with the repetitive stress injuries that drive many people out of our industry.
Q: You have experience in operating software. How are AI and machine learning improving the software available for today’s warehouses?
A: First, you need to remember that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning rely on large data sets that are normalized to recognize patterns, build a model that addresses them, and act accordingly. In the past, our industry revolved around custom software, and that by its very nature made it impossible to create datasets at the scale needed to do this. Standardization of systems and software makes this possible, and the more standardized they become, the larger and more useful the data sets become.
Specifically, AI and machine learning allow software to recognize what is happening in the system in real time. This is where intelligence really comes into play, and it allows modern warehouses to automatically reroute products to avoid bottlenecks, use robotic picking and proactively address component failure before failures occur. It’s important to remember that this is a constant feedback loop, so the systems and the data they draw on improve over time.
Q: Why is the standardization of systems and technology so important?
A: Predictability and standardization are synonymous with each other. Organizations today need to know what performance their new DC system will achieve, how much it will cost to implement, and how long it will take. Standardization is critical to accurately answering these questions and creating systems that can automatically adapt to the demands operators place on them. You want to consistently tackle the same problems in the same ways and then scale the resulting practices to additional facilities. Then you start to see the full potential of automation.
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