cover of episode EP 567: Delivering a Smart Warehouse Experience with Deloitte

EP 567: Delivering a Smart Warehouse Experience with Deloitte

2025/3/3
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Wanda Riddick Johnson
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Wanda Riddick Johnson: 我在Deloitte负责供应链业务,特别是订单履行的部分,其中WMS的选择、实施和运营评估是我的专长。Deloitte的供应链服务涵盖产品工程与开发、采购、智能工厂、订单履行和数字供应链等多个方面。我们帮助客户选择合适的WMS,进行运营评估,并作为系统集成商协助实施。在过去的20多年里,我见证了WMS从本地部署到云端部署的转变,以及数据分析和机器学习在仓库运营中的应用。选择WMS需要先进行运营评估,制定路线图,明确未来需求,然后缩小供应商范围,进行比较和演示,并与现有用户沟通。一些公司出于数据安全考虑仍然选择本地部署的WMS,但云端部署的WMS更有利于未来的升级和竞争力提升。公司选择新的或云端WMS的主要驱动因素包括流程改进、解决劳动力短缺问题以及提升竞争力。疫情后,企业对WMS的需求激增,主要原因是电商的快速增长,需要一个能够同时满足门店、电商和第三方客户需求的系统。选择新兴WMS供应商时,应注意其财务稳定性,进行尽职调查,并寻求系统集成商的帮助。Deloitte的智能仓库体验中心是一个实际运行的设施,展示了自动化技术和数据分析在仓库运营中的应用,并用于培训下一代工程师。智能仓库是指利用自动化和人工智能技术优化仓库运营,并通过数据分析提升效率和客户体验的仓库。我们将在ProMat 2025上首次设立展位,并参与行业报告发布和主题演讲。 Kevin Lawton: 作为主持人,我与Wanda Riddick Johnson讨论了Deloitte在供应链和WMS方面的业务,以及WMS选择和实施过程中的挑战和机遇。我们探讨了WMS的演变,包括从本地部署到云端部署的转变,以及数据分析和机器学习的应用。我们还讨论了疫情对WMS需求的影响,以及如何选择合适的WMS供应商,特别是新兴供应商。最后,我们还谈到了Deloitte的智能仓库体验中心,以及智能仓库的概念。

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Big Joe Forklifts, with nearly 75 years of experience, offers purpose-built integrated lithium-ion forklift solutions at ProMat 2025 (booth N7157). Their innovative approach addresses electrification challenges, providing performance comparable to internal combustion engines at lower maintenance costs.
  • Big Joe Forklifts at ProMat 2025 (booth N7157)
  • Purpose-built integrated lithium-ion forklift solutions
  • Performance rivals internal combustion equipment at a fraction of the maintenance cost

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Want to learn about the benefits of transforming your propane or diesel fleet of forklifts over to purpose-built integrated lithium-ion equipment at ProMat? Go visit Big Joe Forklifts in booth N7157 at ProMat in Chicago, March 17th to 20th. With almost 75 years in business, Big Joe has established itself to be your trusted partner when electrifying your internal combustion fleet of forklifts.

Big Joe has knocked down the last remaining barriers to electrification with its purpose-built integrated lithium-ion forklift solutions with performance that rivals internal combustion equipment at just a fraction of the cost to maintain. Big Joe's broad line of counterbalance forklifts are built around an industrial-duty lithium-ion battery designed, manufactured, and supported all by Big Joe.

Come see their solutions and meet the Big Joe leadership team, including Martin Boyd, Jason Dunnigan, and Nick Malwecki, March 17th to 20th at ProMat in Chicago, booth N7157. That's booth N7157. The New Warehouse Podcast, hosted by Kevin Lawton, is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industries.

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 Lawton with the New Warehouse Podcast, bringing you a new episode today. And on today's episode, I am going to be joined by Wanda Riddick-Johnson, who is a Supply Chain Technology Fellow at Deloitte. And we're going to talk a little bit about

Deloitte and their supply chain focus today. And we're going to dive into a little bit more on the WMS side as well. What's kind of been happening in WMS, how to go about implementing and selection around WMS. And that is Wanda's

specialty. So we're definitely happy to get her expertise and knowledge here on the podcast to talk to us about these warehouse management systems and also what Deloitte is up to on the supply chain side as well. So Wanda, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing wonderful, Kevin. Thanks for having me on the show today and looking forward to have this great conversation.

Absolutely. Happy to get you on here and definitely happy to be connected with you too over the last month or so. I think we got connected and I was very interested actually to hear about Deloitte's involvement on the supply chain side of the world and industry because I think typically...

You know, we don't always think of Deloitte and think supply chain right away. Right. So so why don't you kind of kick us off here? Tell us a little bit about, you know, specifically Deloitte's focus on supply chain and what you all do in that arena. Great. For one, as far as Deloitte goes.

So let me just give you a little background. The reason why I came to Deloitte is because of their supply chain practice. So I used to work for another firm and due to Deloitte's expansion and their depth of knowledge and innovation in supply chain space, that is one of the main reasons I came to Deloitte. But Deloitte has a very deep supply chain offering. We have six different offers within our supply chain practice. So our

I'm only going to focus on the one that I actually fall under, but we have product engineering and development. We have source and procurement. We have our smart factory. We have planet fulfillment and we have our digital supply chain.

I fall under our plan of fulfillment. And the piece that I am under is fulfillment. And in our fulfillment practice, we really focus on how do we actually help our clients understand some of the challenges they face and how we actually help them smooth out those challenges through technology, operational assessments, and other things. One of our main focuses is the logistics and distribution.

I know people look at fulfillment, but fulfillment goes across several spectrums. But I don't know about L&D, it's really the network design.

transportation management, and warehouse management. And I left warehouse management to the last because that is my expertise. And that's what we have a very large practice of practitioners, not only in the U.S., but in Mexico and in India, that we actually take that well-rounded team and help our clients implement. First, we help them select a WMS.

and do operation assessments and walkthroughs. But additionally from that, we help them do a vendor selection, and they would go through the process, and we are a systems integrator. So we help you implement that warehouse management system, as well as transportation management, and helping you understand where your distribution centers are and what is the best place to improve those service levels and reduce costs.

So a broad spectrum there, certainly covering just the fulfillment side there that you talked about. And then obviously, you know, more on the supply chain practice as well. And obviously, you know, we're the new warehouse podcast, so we care about the fulfillment side. So we got the we got the right person here, I think. Right. So definitely. So so very interested in diving into this with you here a little bit. And from the WMS side of me, it sounds like you do.

you know, from pretty much the end-to-end process, right, to making that happen. But you yourself have been specifically involved in WMS for quite some time now in warehouse management systems. So I guess tell us a little bit about

you know, through your career, because, you know, certainly I think, especially in the last couple of years, I mean, there's been a ton of changes around what, you know, warehouse management systems look like and how they operate and what they can do. Tell us, you know, for you specifically or personally, I mean, what, what have you seen throughout your career as some of like the biggest leaps or changes around just WMS in general?

Well, I started with WMS more than 20 years ago. I can use the word AS400. Sure. And now people talk about iService. So I'm dating myself way back when I did PKMS for Manhattan. So that's been a long time ago. But one of the major changes, if you look at the evolution of warehouse management systems, I started on on-prem.

You know, you had your data center sitting in your warehouse. Now, as you see the changes, it's cloud WMS, which is actually making it much easier for your upgrades, much easier for you to understand how to make some of those flexibility for the client, better business decisions and how you can do adjustments. So that's one area that I have really seen a major change in. But the other big change is data analytics. You

You know, if you think back in the day, we did all our manual reports, you know, really didn't talk about business intelligence and all of that. But using all that data to actually make better decisions in your warehouse, not only with your workforce, but also how do you actually ship your orders and all that order management piece? I think the last one that I really want to focus on is machine learning.

Now, I started with automation. I started with tilt trays. I started with shoe sorter. I picked a light, put to light. You know, we still have that around. But now as we move forward, we see the more of the automation and how do you actually use more of the machine learning and those algorithms to continue to, how do you learn from your warehouse data to optimize those processes within your warehouse? Yeah.

Very interesting there. And, you know, obviously in 20 years, there's been a, not just on the WMS side, but just in the warehouse industry in general, there's been a ton of evolution and change from a technology perspective. And, you know,

you know, just what's even possible to do now versus, you know, 20 years ago is if there's a lot more you can do and a lot of different interesting, interesting ways to go about that and technologies that are out there. So it's very interesting to hear some of those changes now. So I guess tell us, you know, now and, you know, when you look at

all of these different changes, right, that you mentioned in there, some of the technologies and things that you're looking at and the capabilities that WMS has now. When you look at even just selection in general, I mean, how do you kind of guide or help a company navigate this, right? Because there's a lot. So

to kind of digest. There's a lot to understand. There's a lot of capabilities to evaluate. How do you even start that selection process at this point with so many options out there? We'll be back after a quick break.

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Yes, it is a lot of options. Really, it depends. First thing, you know, what we always look at is, you know, what is your footprint? So if you're in retail consumer products, you know, what is the best solution that WMS is out there? But before you really start that journey of selecting a WMS, what we do, we want to come in and do an assessment.

Because a lot of times you're, as we talked about over 20 years, some of the people that we work with, they haven't had, they are still using old WMS systems. And those WMS systems are not as robust as the ones that we have today. And then a lot of them want to understand how do I integrate automation? You know, how can I actually, you know, combat the issues of my workforce challenges? So what we like to do and what I have done is I go in first and

Write up a roadmap, understand what is your current systems, current systems that you have in place, current operations, current processes. Once you do all of that, then how do we map it out to say, what is your future look like?

What is those new business requirements? We don't want to do like for like, because as we just talked about, we talked about cloud WMS. So we want to make sure we select a WMS that will actually be sustainable for you. And not only that, it's also, you know, when we gather all those requirements, let's take those requirements and start matching it to what vendors. It may be 10 WMS. Well, we know it's a whole lot more than that. We want to make a short list. Yeah.

So let's get a short list, maybe less than five. And based on those five WMS vendors, how do we actually do a comparison between each one of those? That actually, which one will actually meet at minimum without any modifications, keyword modifications? How do you actually can actually implement that with at least 80 to 90% of that base functionality?

That way you lower your risk of when you're ready to do an upgrade. It's not really an upgrade. It is an upgrade. So those things that we really would like to do. And then the other thing is, you know, it's the integration.

So what is your ERP? You may have SAP, you may have Oracle, or you may have another ERP. And how does that integration work? So all those things together is our journey of how do we actually, and I'm doing this in less than a five minute chat with you, but it takes a little longer to do that. But we want to make sure that when we go in, we talk to the right people. That means the people that's actually doing the work because

Because one thing that we really want to consider is change management. So when you go through that WMS selection, you have people that's been in that White House, that's been doing that same work in that same system for how many years? 10 years. And that's adoption of change. So it's a lot of things that come along with that journey of your selection. But the main thing is how do we select, how do we create a short list?

of the vendors that actually match our business requirements. And then how do we actually go through and do some demos with those vendors? For that way, you could actually see the system, feel it. And also not only that, how do we actually go and do some due diligence? Talk to other clients.

Other customers that's actually using that system, go to their warehouse, walk their distribution center and understand that whole end to end process. And that way you can understand not only this is what we from Deloitte has. Hey, this is our recommendation and this is what we're suggesting. But also what we're doing for you is we're working side by side and talking to other clients that have this solution, too.

Yeah, I love that. And I love both of those aspects that you touched on there. One being, you know, talk to, you know, the people that are using this on a daily basis, right? You know, what are challenges they're having? What are the problems they're having? And, you know, how do we address those? But then also, you know, going and seeing like, okay, well, this is what the after could look like at other operations or customers that have put in this same system or same setup before. And I think getting that

you know real world in a sense understanding of the problem and then the real world understanding of you know what does the solution potentially look like i think takes it to a whole another level right of understanding of what you're you're going to be doing because i think it is

It is a challenge, definitely. I mean, I talked to a smaller 3PL just yesterday, actually, and, you know, they were saying they just, you know, they thought they were switching to WMS that would work for them. And they just, you know, got under a year contract and they had to get rid of it at the end of the year. And we just waste so much money because it wasn't the right contract.

fit for us, right? And I think there's some misalignment there and some misunderstanding of like, what is the actual right fit and how do we go about to figure that out? I'm curious. I mean, you talked about cloud solutions, right? And I think most newer WMSs are certainly on the cloud. But do you see anybody still wanting to go with an on-prem solution or is that pretty much just phasing out at this point?

No, I've run across clients sometime in your life science and your pharmaceutical space where that they have a lot of sensitive information in their data, in their R&D and all that. And they feel more comfortable staying on the on-prem.

And then a client I just recently did about a couple of years ago, they stayed on-prem because of that reason. And just to make sure there's no leakage in their data and data integrity. So, but you don't really have that issue with going on the cloud. But what we always want to talk to a client about is what they're comfortable with. It's not what I'm going to make a recommendation, but we want to make sure that they're happy and to just your point 3PL,

3PL, WMS, when you implement, you got so many different tenants in that building compared to one

you know, retailer that that's all they have is they're shipping their product to a customer or e-com. You have to take all those things into consideration. And going back to on-prem, a lot of people are comfortable with that. They know it's stable and, you know, people still have concerns about being on the cloud, but going in that direction with a WMS moving toward the future and to stay competitive in the marketplace is,

with your upgrades is a solution that you should consider. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I guess that makes sense. You know, people that are

a little more sensitive about the data aspect and things of that nature. But I mean, you certainly, I think if you go on-prem, I mean, you certainly do lose some of those benefits, like you said, to be able to have consistent updates. And I remember my first role in my career working for a company, and that's how I ultimately got into the warehouse world. But we did an upgrade of our system and we were on-prem. It was Manhattan at the time. And yeah, it was like,

I couldn't believe it, how long it took to do the upgrade. And then by the time we were done, the upgrade, it was like, oh, well, and then they told me like, oh, well, this is actually the version that came out like three years ago. As a younger person at the time, I was just like, what? This is insane. This is crazy.

you know, they're like not fully understanding like how the industry worked at that time. I'm like, this is, this is wild. Right. But you know, I think that it's interesting to, to see that and that shift happening as well. So I'm curious, I mean, on that, that side, what do you see, you know, in the last year, maybe last two years or so? I mean, what,

What is some of the top reasons that companies are looking to switch their WMS or looking for a new option? What are some of those drivers that are really impacting that?

I think one of the drivers that they're looking to implement a WMS, a new one or on cloud is if you look at all the changes that you see within the warehouse, you want to improve your process in time. You want to ensure that the system that you put in is going to be around for some period of time because implement a WMS, you're not going to do it every two years or three years. Yeah. It's costly.

So they're looking at, if I integrate this to my ERP, if I integrate this to automation, one of the biggest challenges everybody's facing is workforce.

and having labor shortages. So when they start looking at WMS, they're looking at, hey, how can I actually improve my picking efficiency, my unloading? And if I do all of that, if I have a robust WMS that has a good list of different systems requirements baked in,

As I move along my journey and as I move along increasing my footprint or increasing my throughput, I know this WMS is able to handle all of those different nuances that's coming along. But I think the main reason is, hey, I know I want to have, I want to stay ahead of the marketplace. I want to stay in the market with making sure I have the right product to my right customer. It's all about your end customer nowadays.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the customer experience has been become so critical, right? Especially as we move to more omni channel and more e-commerce specifically, right? You know, that, that touch point with your customers is when they receive that box and open it, right? So, so being able to facilitate an experience I think is, is super critical. I mean, did you see that, um,

The shift of that, certainly, I think we've talked about it plenty of times on this podcast and all around the world, the pandemic, that shift to e-commerce and the explosion there. Did you see that there was an uptick in people looking to adjust their WMS around that time or coming out of the pandemic due to this consumer behavior shift?

Yes, really right after the pandemic, a lot of the surge of, can you come in and help me do assessment of where I am today and where I should be? The one major thing came out of this

Everybody had brick and mortar. A lot of people had the brick and mortar stores. Right. And then you, the foot traffic in those stores, people still are going into the stores, but more people are going online. So how do I actually build my WMS that it'd be, Hey, I could ship to store,

out of that same location, but also I can actually satisfy e-comm order out of that same warehouse. And that way I'm not actually building a new warehouse. You know, a lot of people had, hey, they had a distribution center for shipping to their stores or shipping to a third party vendor. Like if you ship from Ralph Lauren to Dillard's or Bilt, I'm from the South, so I'm using all those stores.

And then you start looking at, okay, now you, you know, I drive down 85 now and it's a Bloomingdale's big e-fulfillment center. Um, that's sitting off for 85. Um, but not only they're not only doing Bloomingdale's out of that facility, probably they're doing their Macy's and all this other brand. So how do they actually take and use a WMS that can actually do multi-brands,

on the channel 2.0 that I actually can say, okay, I'm gonna actually ship it to a store to pick it up for a customer, or I could ship it to you, direct to your house, direct to the consumer, which has always been the case. But now how do I actually use that WMS to be more, hey, how can I fit all my different type of customers that I need to satisfy? And not only satisfy those customers, but within that four walls of that warehouse, how can I actually make sure I am more efficient

in picking this product that, as I said, you can go to this pick face and I can pick out a product that's shipped to a customer. But also I can go to my case pick or my full palette and do a full palette of product to a third-party customer or whomever it may be. Interesting. There's so many different animals out, and I hate to say animals, but different variations. Yeah, yeah.

I just think about when I, years ago, before I got into consulting, I came from industry. So I used to work for TJ Maxx and then I worked for Ralph Lauren. So, you know, that's two different spectrums. You got the full price and you have the all price. Total different footprint, how you do your business requirements. But now when I was still at Ralph Lauren, I did outlet division, ended with that wholesale division out of the same building.

And now as you look at, as they are growing there, they have the e-fulfillment centers. They do a lot more, but that is where the journey for warehouse management systems and distribution, all L and D, that's the direction that so many people want to go in. How do I actually do as you talked about on the channel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's been so, so interesting to see, you know, just the different technologies and solutions that have kind of,

come out of that, right? As you know, people are trying to navigate these more complex things. And as you said, do do multiple different types of business or parts of their business out of one facility, right? How do we make that happen? Right? And how do we do that from, you know, systems perspective, from a physical perspective, all these different complex layers there to be able to do that?

So I'm curious, I mean, from your perspective, because, you know, I'm sure you look at tons of WMSs that are out there and, you know, you mentioned there's certainly a lot more than just 10 WMSs to choose from, right? So we've seen a lot of, you know, WMSs kind of start up as well, you know, in the past few years, you know, coming out of the pandemic too, part of the reefing process.

those complexities kind of spurring that. I mean, what, what is your view on some of the, the startup WMSs out there and, you know, how do you, you know, maybe as a,

uh, someone that's going to be an end user. I mean, how do you, you know, navigate that and how do you understand, like, cause it, you know, you want a software that's going to stick with you for, for quite some time, as you mentioned, you know, you're not going to do a WMS implementation or change every, every two years, right. You don't want to at least, uh, but, uh, you know, how do you kind of navigate some of these, these newer offerings in the market too, as well. And how do you kind of

I guess, advise people, you know, how to, how to look at them to see if they're going to reach that maturity level. That makes sense for like a big investment. 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

and learn about their sustainability, safety, automation, and end-to-end storage solutions in booth S1056. That's booth 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. Well, you're right. It's a lot of startups. It's a lot of small ones. And one thing, when people come and they talk about a WMS, they look at, sometimes they want to look at low cost products.

Well, low cost can actually bite you down the road. So what you really, and some of the startups are great startups and it may be best for your business, but also one key piece when you start looking at a startup is

Sometimes they're private, so you may not be able to get a lot of the financial information, but you do need to dig a little more. Think about if a startup just started on a year ago. Let's see where they are and what their growth was and what clients they actually implemented at WMS. Now you have a startup, and people still say startup after three years because still they're very new, but

As I talked about before, you always need to do your due diligence. You need to go through and really check their financial stability, even if they're not on Wall Street. But still, you should be able to talk to whatever customers they have. What does their support model look like? How many employees do they have? Because now, if they have started up and they have three different customers,

And now you're the fourth customer and you have issues or, you know, you may want to do an upgrade. You may want to change. You want to do that. Do they have enough employees to help do that bandwidth? How do they transfer that knowledge? Custom support. People don't think about that until sometime after the fact.

but you really need to understand that. And you need to understand, look at that package. What's in that package compared to your, back to what I'm saying, you gather your business requirements. You did that. But I always believe in this. Whenever you have, do a selection,

That's the software vendor saying, hey, I'm a fit. I always tell people, hey, you should get another set of eyes like a systems integrator to come in to help you understand how do you actually make sure you make the right decision. You know, sometimes you can go along just with talking to the WMS vendor. But as a startup, you know, it's just understanding that base functionality. You don't really want to do a lot of modifications properly with a startup.

But the key back to all of it is how does it align to your business requirements? How does it align to what does your future growth look like?

But the bottom line is, what is their financial stability? And additionally, do a due diligence. Go talk to their customers that they had implementing that system. And is it the same industry that is a like for like? Everything is not always like for like, but is it similar to your footprint that you actually ship to your customers? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's great advice there because I think it is.

You know, sometimes it's a challenge to think like, oh, well, you know, this company is new, but the solution sounds like it's like the perfect fit for us. Right. But can we guarantee that they're still going to be here in two or three years to support us? Right. So I think that's a great thing to kind of look under the hood, I guess, in a sense and, you know, kick the tires a little bit and see, you know, kind of like, well, you know, one, are they financially stable?

right? Can they even financially survive for another two or three years? And, and who is, who's using them already? And, you know, let's talk to them. I think that goes back to, you know, your initial point earlier in the conversation about, you know, looking at,

you know, internally of what are our needs, but then also externally, like who's using this with success already, right? And how, who is using the solution and what, what can this look like for me? So I think it's really great advice there and definitely appreciate the insights there on the kind of that evaluation and,

and navigating the somewhat crowded market, we'll say, of WMS there as well. So now, additionally, from Deloitte's perspective, you mentioned a little bit in the smart factory side there, but I also have a smart warehouse experience too, I think is my understanding. So tell us a little bit about the smart warehouse experience that Deloitte has created.

Well, we have the spot factory that's in Wichita that is actually, we bring customers or potential clients to walk through and it's the innovative center where they can actually see from end to end from the manufacturing side, because we have a manufacturing line there, to what it looks like and understand what their requirements are. But our biggest smart factory, we call it smart factory in Wichita,

And in Montreal, we have a smart factory, but it's a smart warehouse. We actually have highly automated technology in there. We have automations.

We have auto store. We have a pack size in there. We have other technologies. We have an unloader. And the client can actually come and sit down, a potential client, and go through, this is where they are today. And what does tomorrow look like? And we could take them through all these different use cases that we have built around technology.

And how they integrate to either SAP, Manhattan, Blue Yonder, whatever your WMS may be or may not be. But our key focus is not only automation, but actually how all that data that we collect. Because it is a working manufacturer in Wichita. We do produce kits regularly.

We produced a rover kit that is for STEM that we actually ship out to high schoolers. And they can actually build that robot.

So we actually, so a lot of times people think, oh, it's just a showcase, not just a showcase. It's actually where we actually build out these kits and we ship them out and the students can actually. So it's actually us giving back to the community of how do they actually can do, you know, STEM and STEAM, either one of those. How do we actually use that information to actually build our next generation of engineers?

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I love that it's, you know, really working and producing something because I think, you know, a lot of times you hear about demo centers or innovation centers and things like that, which are very cool, but they're just kind of like, you know, on loops, just showing basically a demo, right? Like not actually doing the real work. And I think, you know, that can make it certainly a difference to see like, well, how is this actually, you know, happening when, you know, something live is going on there. So,

So you use the term smart there, both smart factories, smart warehouse. So I mean, how does Deloitte define like the idea of a smart factory or a smart warehouse? What does that actually mean?

Well, I won't say where Deloitte may find define that because we know across industry, across supply chain, people talk about smart warehouse all the time. Yeah. The smart warehouse in the essence of how we're looking at it is, is a highly automated and intelligent facility that actually leverages technologies like AGVs, ASRs, robotics to actually help optimize your warehouse operation. So, and,

And that's really a smart warehouse, but not only smart warehouse there, but how do you use all that data? We go back to machine learning. We go back to AI. How do you use all that data to collect and make decisions on, hey, connectivity? You know, people now use 5G in their warehouses. How do they actually use that Bluetooth? Smart warehouse can be also coupled with your tablet. So, yeah,

You, you're back in the day when it was no such thing as tablets in the warehouse. A tablet didn't equal this or the mobile app. So we always had the standard RF devices that, you know, you use, but now you use your smartphone. You can scan it. You can get all the data.

So if you think about smart warehouse and defining of what that is, that's all those evolutions of technology that you can use to make your end user smarter, but also smarter technology to actually make sure your customer, everything goes back to your customer. How do I get my product to my customer efficiently, effectively, and on time using that smart technology? Yeah.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's, it's very interesting to see those, those evolutions, like even just the, the tablet you mentioned there kind of gave me a flashback. I had got a job one time in my career and, you know, they gave me an iPad as part of my laptop, iPad, cell phone, and they gave me the iPad. And I was like, I was like, Oh, this, this is cool. Like I can use this on the floor to look at the, you know, the WMS and stuff like that. And they're like,

Oh, no, thank you. You just, you know, you check your emails on it. And I'm like, well, I already have a laptop and a phone. Like, it just sat in my drawer. Like the whole time I worked there, I didn't do anything with it. But but to hear that evolution and you know what we can do and you know, from, you know, not only a software perspective, but then from like, the actual user experience and how do we deliver that onto different devices, I think has come such a long way, super exciting to be able to

give that user experience kind of that next level of treatment, which I think is such a great thing. So very interesting to dive into these different topics with you here, Wanda, and learn from you today and your depth of knowledge here. So you guys are going to be at ProMap this year as well. I think for the first time, I think is my understanding. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what people can expect from Deloitte at ProMap?

So let me make sure. This is the first time that we're going to have a booth at ProMat. Yes. OK. But Deloitte has always partnered with MHI and we've written the annual industry report. So for the last 12 years, we've been writing a report with MHI. So we've always spoke on the stage on that Wednesday to release the report at ProMat.

And we have a panel discussion. So this year I would be the, well, I was two years ago too at MODEX this year. It's 2025 now. I keep saying this is 2025. But in March, I would be the moderator on the stage with the release of the new report. And then additionally this year, as I said, we're going to have a booth.

And our booth is in the supply chain building. But also we will actually have two sessions. We have one session on automate to accelerate. That's going to be on that Monday. If you go on to MHI ProMAT site, you'll see that it'll be at 1.30, 45 minutes. Discuss the session of how automation works.

has accelerated over the years, but also understanding that it will be a panel discussion. And we have some great people that's going to be sitting on the panel to talk about that. Then the other one is Omnichannel 2.0. One of our partners, he has a deep background in Omnichannel. He actually used to be, worked for Manhattan and a lot of other places, but he has a very keen and another young lady who's going to be talking with him, talking about Omnichannel 2.0.

And that would be on that Tuesday, March 18th, that we will be presenting that in the afternoon.

All right. Awesome. And we definitely look forward to seeing you there at ProMet. And I think you guys will be joining us on our live stream additionally as well. So definitely excited for that and really appreciate all the knowledge that you shared with us today on kind of the somewhat crowded and complex WMS side of the industry and really appreciate you coming on and talking to me here.

So if people want to get in touch or learn more about the supply chain side of Deloitte, what's the best way to do that?

Well, you can actually contact me, Wanda Johnson. That's wjohnson at deloitte.com. You can actually find me on LinkedIn under Wanda Riddick Johnson. And I will, if I'm not the right person to talk to you about, I can talk to you about warehouse management systems and automation, but also on any other areas that we actually, I talked about at the beginning. If you have a need there in manufacturing or product engineering,

Just reach out to me and I will connect you with the right person. All right. Sounds great. And we'll definitely put all that information in the show notes here as well as at thenewwarehouse.com so people can easily find them. And really appreciate you coming on and joining me today, Wanda. So thank you once again for your time. You've been listening to The New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com.

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