EP 565: Addressing Automation Transparency with iAutomate and Kardex
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A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin. Hey, it's Kevin with the New Warehouse Podcast, bringing you a new episode today. And on today's episode, I am going to be joined by two guests. I'm going to be joined by Christoph Buchmann, who is the Managing Director at iAutomate, and also TJ Fanning, who is VP of Sales over at Carta.

Kardex. And we are going to learn a little bit more about iAutomate today, which is Christoph's company. And we're going to hear from the solution provider side as well as iAutomate is a tool that not only both the

solution provider, but also the end user are utilizing. And TJ is going to give us a little bit of his insight on how that works. But we're also going to talk about some of the disconnect that exists in our industry between these automation solution providers and the end users themselves and some of the

Maybe gray area, lack of transparency from an information perspective there is and a little bit on how iAutomate is addressing that. So definitely looking forward to this conversation today. So Christophe and TJ, welcome to the show. How are you both? Doing well. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Definitely happy to get you guys on. TJ, I know you're an alumni of the show. Christoph, first time. So welcome back to TJ and great to get you here as well, Christoph. So we talked a little bit about iAutomate today, but let's kind of get an understanding, Christoph, first of a little bit of your background in the automation space and kind of the gap you saw in the market that led to the creation of iAutomate.

Yeah, sure. I have to expand a bit on that. Yeah, I've been in the industry all my professional career. I right out of university went into interlogistics supply chain, started in Europe back in the day with SSI Schaefer, actually. It was great. I started in applications engineering. So I really had a couple of years of very valuable training in being exposed to the technical side of things, how you design a warehouse.

learning the ins and outs of warehouse automation. And over the years, I've been exposed to different markets, the European, South American market. For a decade now, I've been in Canada. So the North American market is really closer to home right now. A lot of exposure, working a lot with US clients, Canadian clients as well, mainly US clients. And been with different companies and different roles. Sales is really, I think, my passion or my background, business development.

And yeah, I'm happy I ended up in this industry. I think it's an incredible time to be in supply chain right now with all the transformation going on. So that's me in a nutshell, basically. All right. Awesome. And then we'll dive into a little bit of iAutomate in a minute here. But let's also hear from TJ here as well. Tell us a little bit about your position and Cardex too as well.

Yeah, for sure. So thanks for having us. And just as Christoph said, I feel like once you're in the industry, you can never get out. Or maybe that's my quote. It's not so sure, right? But I started in operations with Walmart Logistics.

And then spent years both in full case handling, mixed case palletizing, grocery automation, plus auto store, dense storage, fulfillment. And currently I'm with Kardex and really focused on what we call our Kardex Solutions Group, which is the fastest auto store provider globally. So excited to talk a little bit about how we're leveraging iAutomate to provide some more transparency to the entire industry.

which has really been a passion of mine that I'm super supportive of why I'm regularly on the New Warehouse podcast. You need more and more of this information to be able to dissect going to a trade show and just seeing thousands of booths and being overwhelmed by information. Let's actually provide real transparency to the market.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, to both your points there, I mean, the market is, it's certainly exciting, right? As Christoph said there that, you know, there's so much happening and so many different interesting things, innovative things happening too as well. But then, you know, to your point, TJ, like, I mean, it's flooded with options, right? If you're an end user, you know, you could walk into a ProMatter Modex and you're,

your head will spin a little bit like, you know, what's the right way to go? And, you know, shiny object here, shiny object there. Is that even the right thing for me? So I think, Christophe, you're trying to, you know, help with some of that transparency as well. So tell us a little bit about iAutomate and what you're trying to accomplish with that.

Yeah, absolutely. And take a step back maybe to where or how this all started. So I did found and I launched iAutomate now and my passion and both, you know, TJ was saying bringing transparency to the market or making access to warehouse information, warehouse solutions, making it more accessible. That's really what drives me. But through my career, you know,

at SSI Schaefer or at Dramatic or, you know, last even over Robotics, I was always in a customer facing sales role where just the nature of it is you get a lot of leads and you got to work through these leads and kind of

filter out the high probability from the low probability ones. But the initial effort is always the same. And very often the question was, what does automation cost? Which we'll probably get into that, but it's very difficult to answer. But then again, that was the challenge. You know, it shouldn't be that hard to answer.

And just the time that it consumed nurturing a lead and developing it past that initial bump where you can say, okay, this is worth pursuing or it's just not of high value that the customer doesn't have the budget. It needs more nurturing, more education. It could be a million reasons why that lead just doesn't make it to the next step. It was time consuming. And the more I was, especially in the bigger organizations,

Just the headcount that gets involved, you know, you register the lead, you talk to the customer, you get an engineer assigned. You do quite a lot of work just to get a simple, what is often called a ROM, you know, rough order magnitude quote. That's really the first thing that you start talking about with a customer or the first thing they want. Just to get that done was time and resource consuming and cost money. And at the end of the day,

You work 40 hours a week. If you lost 20 hours of that due to leads that didn't go anywhere, well, that's not a very efficient use of your time. And everyone was in the same boat. The solution providers wanted to focus on more high value leads and the customers also, they wanted a quick answer to an initial question. Should I be looking at automation and what does that even cost? As generic as that might be.

born out of that. At times, frustration. At times, I just thought we're working in automation, yet no one's figured out how to automate or accelerate this process. I kind of felt compelled to start building my own tools. And, you know, many companies have these configurator tools to do a quick ROM. It's not a secret, but I don't think people are leveraging them to the extent that they could. And really just to reduce the time I spend

lost on leads that are not going anywhere and to increase the time I'm spending on leads that are going to go somewhere. That was what I was trying to do. And then I thought, why isn't there a company out there that does this? And then I thought, why isn't there an app, for example, where you could just do this? Really a

do-it-yourself, a tool to empower the customer on the one side that they can answer these questions, but also something that benefits me as a solution provider working for Cardex, Schaefer, whoever, just accelerate that process of converting a lead and filtering out the high probability one. So if I sum that all up, to streamline the access to advanced warehouse automation solutions and to enhance the dialogue, to accelerate that dialogue between the end user who wants automation and the solution providers themselves,

That's what iAutomate was born out of. That's the software we've developed. And the vision is really to facilitate the transition towards Industry 4.0. It's a big buzzword that's been thrown around. But as I said, we're actually in very exciting times for our industry. We're going through a huge transformation. Things like AI, technology.

data analytics, robotic capabilities. I think there's been huge advancements in the last 10 years if you look at warehouse automation at large. But also the challenges companies are facing. Why is it such a hot topic? Why is the need to automate so much more important? Well, you know, labor challenges, cost of real estate rising, all these problems need solutions. And the best way to contribute to that transformation is to provide

tools, practical, tangible tools that bring those who need automation together with those that can provide it. So as you can see, there was, you know, selfishly a need that kind of that's how I developed this. I was frustrated with the time that was being lost. I also wasn't serving the customer. Sometimes a customer just wants to know

It's $10 million. I have a budget of $100,000. So you help that customer by understanding don't waste your time on it. So it's a win-win situation. And how do you put that in a nice, easy to use tool, something as simple as an app, really? That's the background of iAutomate and that's what I set out to do. Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. And I love too that it was something that

you're just trying to solve for yourself. And then, you know, you start to realize like, Oh, a lot of other people probably having this, this problem too, as well. Yeah. Very common. I think if you ask the 20 biggest solution providers, they'll probably all agree that this is a challenge. Yeah, absolutely. And, and so, you know, on that side, I mean, we've kind of touched on here a couple of times that, you know, there's kind of a,

Lack of transparency in a sense, or a little bit of a disconnect from an information perspective, right? So I guess, TJ, from your perspective, you know, why do you think that there has been kind of limited access to either understanding what automation opportunities are out there or just general information around some of these automation solutions themselves? We'll be back after a quick break.

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Yeah, great question. I think fundamentally, every integrator thinks that their value is creating something custom and unique. And yet when you talk to the customers and you talk to especially the IT organizations, do they really want to be bleeding edge and custom and unique? I don't go and buy a custom car. I don't ask them to build me a custom building, right? I lease a standard building in the US that happens to be close to an airport.

And I, and I think that this is the biggest challenge is that the integrators continue to believe that the design has to be extremely custom, extremely unique, which is then why nobody wants to answer the question of, Hey, what's it cost. And I think that this is actually the biggest thing limiting our industry is we stand here on a pulpit and say, Hey, you need to automate because your competition is, I mean, for example,

Auto store just delivered 8 million bins autonomously in a single day. Yeah. Think about that for a second, right? 8 million bins delivered in a single day autonomously. But yet when you ask somebody, what's the price of an auto store? The answer is, well, we'll get back to you in six months. Yeah. That's that thing. That is the wrong answer. Right. And then I would fundamentally also say like, especially with Cardex and, and how we leverage auto store,

It's not always just about price. Like the other thing that we've unlocked by leveraging iAutomate is, hey, I'm out of space, but yet I see this really dense storage solution. And how big would I need of a facility if I was to leverage an auto store by Cardex, right? And very quickly now we can give them a 3D rendering, a cube based upon how much product they need to store, how many bins, how many SKUs.

And so now think about if we can enable the real estate individuals that today just think, date me another 200,000 square foot facility. Everybody's trying to bring product back to the US, right? It's not just about what's the cost of the solution or the ROI, but also what's the density? Do I really need a 200,000 square foot building? And so what we're seeing is the shift of transparency enables more people to be commonplace to talk about it.

Today, if you go out to your real estate brokers, most say, I'm here to find you a 200,000 square foot building and what height do you want and what geography, right? And it really should be, is the facility automation ready? Does it have the right clearance? Does it have the right fire suppression? Does it have the right energy capabilities? And how do we enable this to be more of a holistic solution than just the three engineers at a customer and the two engineers at the integrator designing something highly customized?

I think, TJ, you just hit a good point. I think the industry at large, the solution providers speaking for them, they missed an opportunity here in the past where they always want to give the perfect engineered answer to what does that cost for me? Let's say I'm, I don't know, I'm Nike. I want to build a new warehouse. We always tried to give them a perfectly legally binding functioning quote system, you know,

That's an overkill. And as the industry is transforming and solutions are becoming more modular, more standardized, more of a commodity, I like the thought of just give them an answer that's good enough, at least in the beginning. So, you know, the engineering is still going to follow. You're not going to build a house without engineering it. But that customer just initially wants to understand, okay, 10,000 bins, $5 million. It's this performant. That's what I can expect. It fits into a warehouse this shape and size and height.

That's good enough. So I think that's where we've been in our own way. And I say we because I, you know, for 15 years, I've been working on that side of it. But just give a quick answer that's easy enough to continue this dialogue and thereby help the customer also accelerate that process further.

A little bit. I mean, the same way I can walk into a car dealership and I, you know, I see the Audi RS6, which by the way, is the coolest car ever built. And the guy says, well, that's $150,000. So I walk out backwards again, but then the guy can turn around or the girl and say, but the Audi A4 is $40,000. And now we're talking, right? So just by helping me kind of narrow down my options quickly, it further promotes the dialogue and gets the right people together to end up building warehouse automation systems.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a great point. I love the analogy to the car dealership there because I think that makes so much sense, right? Because I think in some cases it's either, you know, the, you get the initial like sticker shock, right. From somebody like you mentioned earlier where, you know, they have a budget of a hundred thousand dollars and you're like, Oh, well the solution is 10 million. Right. And then it's like,

Oh, well, then they start to think, oh, I'm not at automation right now. Like I can't afford anything, right? Where as if you have more of that visibility, transparency, then like you said, with the car scenario, it's like,

Oh, well, here is an option that you could do for 100,000, right? Or even in the sense of, I think there's probably some people too, where they probably just have the idea that automation is incredibly expensive. And it's not even in even in my ballpark to even explore at this point, right? So I think

There's a lot of disconnect there in that sense. We've talked about it a couple times, mentioned it here, but let's talk about this. That lack of transparency around the cost of automation. What really has driven that at the core? How much does automation actually cost? I don't know if Christoph or TJ, you want to take that first. I'll leave it up to you guys. Go ahead, TJ. Sure.

Yeah, sure. Put it on the provider of the hardware now, right? Yeah. What are you going to charge us? Yeah.

And I asked this question to them because it frustrates me every time. Right. So the market, if I go out there and I look at YouTube and I key in auto store, the most likely stuff that pops up are the biggest systems. And so then immediately you think if you're somebody with 10,000 bins or 30,000 bins, oh, well, this probably isn't for me.

And the reality is, is like 90% of the auto store installations are in this like 15,000, 25,000 bin solution set. And so why do we have this massive disconnect, right? And the reality is, to Christoph's point, most of the time, integrators are spending so much time and effort on just the qualification of an opportunity.

that they disqualify the smaller things because nobody pays for a lot of that qualification, right? It's all cost of sales. And so when I asked the group in the audience here today in Cincinnati what they thought an auto store cost, the number I got back regularly was $10 to $15 million. And the reality is that regularly we see auto stores in $2.5 million, $4 million, $5 million. Yes, of course, there's some big ones in the $10, $15, $20 million, right?

But regularly, the solution sets are well under $5 million. And we're even doing things where organizations are leasing equipment now and bringing monthly payments down under $75,000 a month. Right. And so day one ROI, when you think about just the savings from an OPEC standpoint, the labor savings, the space savings.

Combine it with a lease arrangement and all of a sudden you can have day one ROI and completely eliminate this three, $4 million of capital that today the market might think is actually 10. And so the really powerful thing that we've identified with iAutomate is because we've simplified and accelerated the design concepting, high level budgets, very quickly now our customers are also becoming their own engineers. Right.

They can actually leverage, hey, if I adjust that now to 10,000 bins instead of 25, what's that do for price, right? So I'll flip it and say to the entire audience of New Warehouse Podcast, think for a second. If I said put 25,000 bins into an auto store and what do you think the square footage is? And I'll say that the building's 26 foot clear, right? 25,000 bins, 600 by 400 bins roughly. Just think about that, right? And what's the square footage required?

Very quickly now using the tool set, you can see it's 6,800 square feet. Where else do you find that information, right? Normally they get there three months. Sign an NDA, review your documentation, your data set, go expose a bunch of files out of your ERP or your WMS. But very quickly now you can assess, does this actually fit in my building? What's the density that I can save?

And now we're both aligned of, Hey, does this make sense or not? And the Christoph's point, maybe all the stores, not the right solution. Maybe it's a vertical lift module, a carousel, a shuttle, right? But how much time do you take just to decipher down to these are the three types of technologies I should go look at. Interesting. Yeah. What do you think there, Christoph? What are your thoughts on the pricing conversation? Yeah, definitely agree. Actually, I was just, uh,

Thought immediately popped to my head when TJ was explaining that an auto store doesn't have to be that expensive. It can be a million dollars. In fact, that's one of the things of this transformation we're seeing. Automation is becoming affordable, more accessible for even smaller companies. You can start with way smaller entry level solutions and scale them.

By being able to say, well, it's actually only that much very quickly, and you could even potentially lease it, you're opening the door for so many more customers to leverage automation than what 20 years ago would have been your typical automation customer. So you're broadening the profile of people who can benefit from automation. And the way to do that is to make the access to these critical initial questions. What does it cost? How big is it? To make that fast

and easy. So empowering the customer creates a win-win situation. It grows a bigger market for the solution providers, but you're also putting the tools into the customer's hand to do it yourself. And we're seeing that in so many other areas. I mean, there's not a car manufacturer where you can't on the website configure your own car, right? It's just a given. Well, why aren't we doing that in the automation space? And that kind of ties into your question. So why has there been a lack of transparency? And I think one way to look at it is going back to the origins of

Warehouse automation systems have in the past been custom designed, complex, custom tailored solutions. You can't really put a price off the shelf. You can't just fire from the hip and say what does a customized solution cost. And if you look at the warehouses from the 90s and the 2000s, they were in many cases very unique and customer tailored.

But what we're seeing now is this transformation to commodities. They're becoming out-of-the-box solutions. So this whole...

process to engage with a solution provider, get on a sales call, have them tell you what data you need. Now you spend three days pissing your IT team off because you want all this data that they don't have. Now you're getting back to the solution provider. By the time they give you a ROM, maybe two weeks have passed, maybe more, maybe four weeks, all depending, and you haven't really achieved anything yet. And I think because these solutions are becoming more commoditized, standardized, it's

It's a lot easier to say, well, your system is this big and will cost that much. And therefore, you're having this more meaningful conversation a lot faster of, I think I could use automation. And AutoStore is just a fantastic to bring up in that context, because they are really the pioneers in driving this transformation towards standardized, commoditized, modular process automation.

The words modular and scalable have been abused. The amount of times I've used them myself, I'll be honest, you know, everything's modular and scalable. Is it truly? I think Autostore is one of the greatest examples out there of a truly modular and scalable solution. And one of the pioneers in making this

an out-of-the-box solution. I think they even took it to the extent where P.O., the company, belongs to them. You could buy these out-of-the-box, kind of, you know, just buy it right off of the internet type solution. And that's unheard of. That is awesome stuff. And that allows to now become a lot more transparent. And I think the other challenge, just traditionally, why this hasn't been, it's not been easy to get a price is solution providers have been afraid to give a number that's then out there and be on the hook for it.

And I think that narrative has to change a bit. You're not on the hook for it. Just because I told you it's 10 million, there's 10 ways we could reiterate this layout and it could change every time you give me new data. But I also shouldn't be afraid to tell you, well...

An Audi A6 will cost $40,000 to $60,000 depending on your configuration. You should be able to ballpark it with confidence. So I think those are some of the changes we've seen in the last 10, 15 years. Yes, there's this standardization. But part of what we have seen is that iAutomate enables us to do some things that historically you would have had three other people go review it. So everything that Christoph describes is correct, right? So I have a global customer and they say, what's it cost for this?

And if you think about it, the cost is different depending on the region. It's not just auto store. It's well, what's the height of the building, right? Because the height of the building changes the system layout and the size and things of this nature. And so the thing that's really unique is in all my years of experience and you talk to the three PLs, they struggle with this as well. Like a customer comes to you and says, Hey, get me a solution in a ballpark for a price. Yeah.

And we want to ask 40 questions. And then those 40 questions turn into 160 variables on the back end and then sending out RFQs and RFPs. And by the way, you're doing this typically with some engineers. And so they're not cheap resources. The complexity continues to ratchet up. And then you have three people that want to review the price before it goes out to make sure that we don't have a miss because we, that engineer is only been working with that technology for six months or even less. Right.

And so what we've done with iAutomate is without exaggeration, eight questions, but by eight questions from the user enables me to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 plus variables on the backend to define an accurate price, no matter where in the globe you want to go install this solution set. And that's really powerful, right? I no longer am worried about

Well, did they get an RFQ from a vendor that actually knows how to install in California or seismic conditions or right? Like all these exception cases we've actually built in to get fairly accurate proposals and designs. And this is for me, the most exciting and powerful thing is now I've enabled my own resources. I can enable three PLs to come to our store X calculator powered by iAutomate.

generate an accurate pricing based upon the geography of the system, right? The location. And we will stand behind those numbers. And so it's not just, Hey, I opened this book and I saw a bin is $19 and 50 cents. Yeah. Well, what's the transportation cost of that bin? Where was the bin produced? Right? Like you've actually got it down to a science. Thanks to some of the power of I automate to drive locations into it. Seismic conditions, installers, right?

Right. Like what's the resin index this month? What's the currency exchange rate? These things can all be automated, which historically have been manual Excel spreadsheets. And then you're worried about who updated it and when. And that's true with what's happening in the industry. Right. We'll be back after a quick break. Have you heard of Nucor warehouse systems? Well, they should definitely be on your radar.

Forge a connection with the Nucor Warehouse Systems team at ProMat 2025 and learn about their sustainability, safety, automation, and end-to-end storage solutions in booth S1056. That's booth S1056.

S1056. And make sure to join us on a panel hosted by Nucor Warehouse Systems on Monday, March 17th at the Sustainability Transportation Theater, where I will be moderating a discussion on the process of recycling steel and how companies can reach sustainability goals within the warehouse. We will see you in Chicago.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really interesting to hear from that perspective. And I think it's, you know, it's pretty, pretty funny you're saying there, you know, that this stuff has been manually updated in a spreadsheet to support automation solutions, right? Like, why are we not automating this part of the process too? And I think, you know, really interesting there to TJ, what you said earlier about

you know, you go on YouTube, you search for auto store and you're going to see like the biggest, like auto store projects that are out there. And, you know, maybe that's like, uh, maybe there's like a little fault on a marketing side there too. Right. To, to give some, you know, obviously companies want to talk about like, Oh, we got the, the big name as one of our customers. Right. I mean, that's good, like social proof, but then the same side, like, then are you, you know, discouraging, uh,

Those smaller players too, that are just looking for like a smaller, like you said, 10,000 bins or something like that to put in their operation. So it's a really interesting perspective there. And I think, you know, obviously definitely seeing the value of iAutomate and, you know, how they can help to,

you know, for the solution providers, certainly simplify that sales process and also give, you know, some of that immediate feedback, immediate questions that, you know, I'm sure most end users have right away. But as you guys both pointed out, you know, maybe might not even get those answers until like three months later, right? And then, you know, you have the back and forth and that data collection you mentioned in there. And

you know, sometimes, you know, I'm sure you guys have experienced this on the sales side, like here, you know, by the time that all gets together and things, you know, I'm sure you've had some times where people are like, well, actually I've

you know, in the last month or two, since we've been trying to get this together, like why our priorities shifted, right? We'll have to look, come back and look at this later. Right. So, but talk to us a little bit more to, uh, Christophe on the, the end user side. Right. So, you know, I think a great example here is like, we're, we're coming up on ProMat right in, in 2025 and, you know, people are going to be going there and they're going to be

Looking for solutions, trying to, you know, figure out what's right for them. I mean, what's a way like that that end user could leverage iAutomate when, you know, they're either prepping for ProMat or they go to ProMat, they see something they like and they want to get a little bit more information about it.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think the dialogue, the conversation here has been so far a lot around how it works as a sales accelerator tool. That's one part of it and an important part. The other one is really how it works as a solution validation tool. So the one side is working with customers like TJ and Kardex to accelerate sales. But the other thing is we

We designed iAutomate with the customer in mind, empowering the customer, right? It's really all about giving them access to this type of information that has traditionally been a bit harder to find. I like to use...

FlightHub as an example. FlightHub is a platform, right? I could go on each and every airline's website. I could Google the same flight and I could then get the pricing or just go to FlightHub and I get the comparison of all different options. And I think that's what's been missing in industry. And that's what we want to be is a neutral solution provider agnostic platform to a certain extent where you have access as an individual user. You could be someone who runs an operation for a warehouse. You could be chief of supply chain, uh,

Anyone who's interested in qualifying an opportunity for warehouse automation can access iAutomate and can educate themselves, can get some really high quality data, like what does that solution actually cost, and can then further develop the business case to get the approval and necessary internal support and funding to actually further drive this. Because I think one disconnect that I've experienced in my career is

Every lead gets you excited because you think, oh, they're going to buy something right after your first phone call. You're like thrilled. They want to build a new warehouse and everything sounds exciting. But the problem is they still have an entire internal process to go through that you have zero leverage over. You cannot influence the speed and the process of them getting a budget approved. So by empowering the end user to build a business case initially to build it themselves, you

it creates a win-win situation and it's really, it all comes back to empowering the end user. So if you are working for DHL or any other big organization looking at automation actively or passively, or you're in the early stages of doing so, prior to going to ProMat, you can use iAutomate as a solution validation tool. You can have a general idea of what various different technologies and solutions look like, what they cost,

And you're in a much more prepared position to then actually go to the market and talk to the experts behind it. Because again, we're the middleman. We're trying to accelerate this dialogue a bit to connect the companies like CardX and those who need CardX. So there's a practical way how you can leverage the software to educate and empower yourself to be in a stronger position to pursue the opportunity of warehouse automation. Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. And I think that's a great tool to be able to utilize, like you said, to, you know, not only just any time of year, but especially like when you're gearing up to go see like what's the latest and, you know, figure out whether it's beforehand or even like on site or after you see something new and think about like, oh, is this even...

really viable for me to look at and it kind of takes away some of that that lack of transparency that we're talking about before what do you think on that side tj for the the end user perspective and how they can kind of leverage i automate um to validate some of these solutions yeah i mean i feel terrible for end users in our market right now that's terrible to say right but like

Guys, I've sat in these trade shows and you go and grab lunch and all you hear about it is, oh my God, I'm overwhelmed. I have no idea what to do, right? So I put myself in their shoes. There are 1,165 exhibitors at the show planned. If you spend five minutes at each, that means 97 hours just to look at their booth and understand is it possible or not, right? And so I like to tell a funny story that

I had an auto store behind me like seven, eight years ago. Of course, it's at a trade show, so it's not full size, right? It was like eight foot tall, had clear siding so everybody could see exactly how it works. And this end user came up to me and said, man, I need to buy this right now. And I said, oh, what business are you in? And they were in lobsters.

They thought that you could fill it with water and then have the bins bring WAPs to the picker. And this is fundamentally the challenge space is that we build something custom for a trade show to gain market visibility, et cetera, because we know you can't go walk 90 hours in four days at the event, right?

And so now we're actually not even showing you the real solution. In most cases, we're showing you some like smaller simplified version. Cause by the way, the trade show likes to charge us a lot of money to come in and set it up. And so you don't even get to see the real solution. You're expected to somehow walk the show and come back to your executive team with great ideas of what you should go do to change your network. That's a really hard problem. Right? And so, um,

Then you say, oh, well, prepare for it. Go to the ProMat website ahead of time and search for what you want, right? And we put them in categories. And so this way you don't have to visit 1,165 vendors. And so we have categories like automated guided vehicles and automated fork trucks. They are two separate categories. On the meat, like they do the same thing. Oh, and then we have AMRs. They sound like the same thing. Yes, they have different ways to navigate, blah, blah, blah, right? Like,

The end user doesn't care. The end user says, I have this many operators. I have this much square footage. I'm processing this many orders. This is what iAutomate's leveraging to then help you narrow down who you should talk to and whether or not the solution has payback. That's really powerful for an end user. Now I can take my two-day visit to ProMat and really love it to go visit the six, eight, ten solutions that may fit.

and really spend an hour with each one to understand the intricacies of, no, it doesn't work in saltwater. No, I can't do any of those or lobsters. Right. But this is like fundamentally, this is how hard it is for an end user. Right. Like what is real? And then it's so overwhelming across multiple buildings and we don't speak the same language for our end users. And that's what we need to do. How many pieces of product, how many SKUs are you storing? How many orders do you process a day? Right.

If we speak their length, we can add so much more value so much faster. And that's what we've really tried to bring to the market by combining iAutomate with the Cardex Solutions Group. I agree. TJ, the amount of times you stand at the booth as a vendor and you have that awkward moment where there's a customer or a group of customers looking at your booth and you're obliged to go there and start the sales conversation. But

You just really don't know. They might not be interested or they might be the completely wrong profile. You have no idea, right? But you somehow got to get into this. What if they would come prepared with a good understanding of what they're looking for? They're at your booth for the right reasons. Like TJ said, they know why they went to the Cardex booth because they already informed themselves that AutoStore is a good solution. And by the way, they have an understanding of how big and performant it should be. It's a game changer. The conversation has a whole different...

And that's where really you're adding value to this customer's time, which I think at the end of the day is the most important thing. And if you think about it today, a customer going to a trade show might be 5% to 10% educated on the type of reasons, solutions they're going there.

If they use Diatomate, they might be 50% further. That's 50% more knowledge, more insight, more general, better understanding of what you're looking for. That's significant. And that only takes you seconds to do. And I think that's where it just adds value to the customer. And at the same time, it also lets you as a solution provider exhibitor be of more value to your customers. Because nobody wins if you're talking, having a great conversation with someone who wants to put lobsters in an order store bin. It's not going to happen.

As cool as the story is, maybe Canadians need that up here. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Definitely. And I mean, I think that's a great idea for auto store to work on the lobster store. I mean, I just think about, you know, go to a restaurant and, you know, you pick your pick your lobster out of an auto store. I mean, that's that's an experience. Yeah, for sure. But yeah.

But yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point there because, you know, it is on both sides, right? It's kind of like there's a lot of wasted time almost in a sense, right? Like you said, Christoph, you know, somebody approaches your booth there and, you know, you're obliged to interact with them. But then, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes later, you're talking to them and, you know,

you know you realize like oh this this is not the right solution for them right and you know so it's it's like their time is kind of wasted in a sense because they don't really know and they're just trying to navigate the the space and figure that out so having that tool to be able to decipher that a little bit ahead of time or even like i guess on the the go-to i mean as as they're there maybe potentially you know i think is a is a great thing to have for sure so if

So very interesting to talk to you both here and talk a little bit about some of these gray areas of the automation space and how you're bringing these to light a little more, Christophe, and bringing that transparency. And I think making it a win on both sides now for the solution providers like TJ and also the end user too, which I think is really important to be able to do. And also, you know, empowering that.

consumer as well, much as we're empowered in our, you know, personal consumer lives now are empowered in this, you know, automation procurement space as well, which I think is super important. So really appreciate you both coming on. Great conversation today. Christophe and TJ too. I mean, you guys will both be at ProMat there, but Christophe, if people want to use the tool prior to ProMat or they want to get to know you at ProMat as well, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, visit the website, iautomate.app or download the app. It will be available on Google Play Store and Apple. Get in contact with us. We'll be at the show the whole week. Super excited to be there, meet up with anyone. So yeah, contact us through email and visit the website and use the app. It's available to the general public. So we want, again, it's all about empowering the user. We want to make sure that we, I love using buzzwords, democratize access to warehouse automation information, but...

The tools are there. They're available and get in touch. We'll be happy to set up some time during the show. Awesome. Awesome. And I think you guys will be our like booth neighbor right down the thing too, right? So we are, I think we're literally booth neighbors. So, so TJ can pick that. Yes, definitely. Yeah. So you come see us, you go see iAutomate, come see iAutomate, come see us next. So whichever the case may be. And TJ, what about you? What's the best way to get in touch and learn more about Cardex?

Yeah. So of course you can reach out through our website. We will also be at ProMat. So booth in the South Hall 3562. We'd love to have you there. We'll have a full auto store there. We'll have our intuitive pick assist, which combines artificial intelligence with an auto store to maximize accuracy as well as efficiency.

We'll have our Storex calculator powered by iAutomate there so we can do on-the-fly real-world scenarios to give you sizing and price, etc. And of course, feel free to reach out to me if anybody wants to continue the conversation or ask about lobsters. I do like lobster. I just got back from Boston. So feel free to reach out, LinkedIn, everywhere, right? And I'm sure we'll be back in another new warehouse podcast in the near future.

Definitely, definitely. And I appreciate all that information. And yeah, we'll see TJ on the next episode of Lobster Talk as well, which is the new podcast coming out next year. And so definitely appreciate you guys joining me today. And we'll put all that information at thenewwarehouse.com so people can easily find it and also in the show notes here as well, wherever you're watching or listening. So Christophe and TJ, thank you very much for your time today.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes and for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.