We recently caught up with LogistiVIEW CEO Seth Patin and CTO David Erickson to discuss their journeys in supply chain software and their advice for companies considering automation in today's fast paced technology environment. Here are the highlights from that conversation. Before LogistiVIEW, both executives built their careers inside the warehouse software that has long defined the industry. Hi, I'm Dave Erickson. I'm the CTO of LogistiVIEW. I have spent my entire career in the pursuit of software excellence in the supply chain area, dating back to the early warehouse management systems, labor management systems, and it's now an exciting time where we focus on warehouse execution systems. Hi, I'm Seth Patin, CEO and Founder of LogistiVIEW. Over the course of my career, I've worked as a WMS vendor, a WMS customer, a WMS implementation consultant, and through that entire period of time, I learned what WMS does very well and what it doesn't necessarily do very well. LogistiVIEW is a warehouse execution system that I designed and built from the ground up to solve the problems that warehouse management systems were never designed to solve. Warehouse management systems are focused on record keeping, keeping track of inventory, keeping track of financial records, keeping track of locations. The one thing they don't do well is tell people in robotics how to do the work that needs to be done. Nobody goes to work every day in a warehouse to keep their systems happy. They go to work to ship product, and warehouse execution systems are built to make that process work for the people in robotics who are doing That experience shaped how the company began and how its direction has shifted as warehouse automation has matured. I started LogistiVIEW because particularly at that point in my career, was running Exalogix, which was a professional services consulting firm that specialized in warehouse management system implementation, particularly at the time JDA, now that you know, nowadays Booyonder and formerly Red Prairie warehouse management software. But every single time the customer came to me and said, I wish this weren't so darn expensive. And so it kind of got to this point where I thought there's got to be a better way. And LogistiVIEW was kind of the the... Seemed like the obvious answer to me of creating a system that allows you to flexibly control your process and orchestrate instead of just tracking data. You know, as a northerner, I understand the mentality of comfort in adding layer upon layer and bundling up and bundling up. That doesn't work as well for software systems and especially not warehouse management applications. Over time, they've gotten very bulky. They've gotten very cumbersome. With LogistiVIEW, we had the opportunity to create a system from scratch that shed some of those layers and gave us the nimble approach to solving warehouse execution the way it needs to be done. Over time, the warehouse floor itself began to change, and with it, the company's priorities. I think the most impactful turning points in the development of LogistiVIEW ES is the transition from human centric with fixed automation that was really inflexible to being orchestration centric around complex autonomous automation, integrating and working side by side with people. As the industry... The automation industry has developed and new and advanced solutions have become available, it's becoming more and more critical now than ever to make sure that the machines and the people actually all work together, particularly machines from different vendors who don't have a common controller and the people who are working in amongst all of those machines who don't really care what vendor they came from. All of it has to work together. And those advances in automation and the changes that they brought to the warehouse are probably the most impactful changes that have shaped the roadmap of LogistiVIEW software. As automation grows more capable, both leaders draw a sharp distinction between a faster machine and a faster operation. Automation is very good, but I think the question is what are you automating? Because if you're automating a machine, like if your goal is to automate movement, there's a lot of solutions to automate movement. But a lot of times, the problem isn't the movement itself. It's what movement is happening when and why. And so I would ask the question, are you automating throughput and decision intelligence that gets you the the outcome you're looking for, or are you automating purely to say you have more speed? Because more speed does not guarantee more throughput. And ultimately, the goal of a warehouse is to ship orders or basically get product through the facility. If you automate only movement without consideration for automating the decisions and intelligence around how to move the product and when, then you're probably automating for the wrong thing. The same principle applies when a single piece of equipment is evaluated apart from the processes around it. I think the number one thing people underestimate is the, impact of siloed automation and optimization. You know, if you're... Let's say you have a conveyor for simplicity that can move a thousand cases per hour. Yeah. That's great. But if you can't deliver a thousand cases per hour from whatever upstream process feeds that conveyor, or you can't remove a thousand cases per hour from whatever downstream process that conveyor feeds, then your conveyor is limited regardless of how fast it's capable of being or how much money it costs. It's limited by the incapacity of the upstream and downstream processes. And so what people tend to do is they automate for speed without consideration for the velocity of the entire process, and you have bottlenecks. And those bottlenecks create underperforming automation assets. David Erickson frames the cost of that isolation in more familiar terms. If you ever get a chance, go observe a silent disco. A silent disco is an event where everybody's got their own set of headphones and they can choose from one of, say, four or five different musical styles and genres. So you've got a dance floor where you can't hear any sound, but the dancers can and they're all dancing to their own beat. They're literally all dancing to the sound that they picked up. It looks really cool to watch to try to figure out what different people are doing and what style they have. It's terrible for orchestration. Nobody's doing the same thing. You can't tell and you would never get anything done. If you optimize individual silos of operation within a distribution operation, you are going to get a silent disco. No good handoffs, no smooth flow and no coordination between any of these systems. So how should an organization prepare? Their guidance centers less on equipment and more on process, planning, and the people closest to the work. First of all, it's clarity of purpose. Can you easily explain what the automation is supposed to do? And to the point where the IT group, the operations group, the frontline workers, the financials, and the executive team all can give that answer in a relatively similar way. If you are not abundantly clear of what the automation is supposed to do, then that's where complexity tends to sneak in, as well as you perhaps fail to see the full range of possibilities of what may or may not make the automation work best. If your automation is not designed to handle anything but the most ideal circumstances, then your automation will either slow you down or be underutilized because too many things will have to go outside of it. Automation is all about making a good process faster. So the first thing that you can do is start by making your processes good. Automating a bad process is basically automated scaled waste. And so automating, and this actually is... It's not an uncommon mistake. A lot of folks do automate bad processes and then find out only after the fact that the process hasn't scaled inefficiency the way that they wanted it to. They should start spending time with the team leads and the personnel in each of the different functional areas where automation is a candidate. They should understand what goes right on a daily basis, but more importantly, what goes wrong. What are they dealing with that's outside the norm? What are the fluctuations in their job? What makes that job interesting or challenging on a daily basis? Knowing those types of things will help them identify where automation will go in with the least amount of friction and be able to probably provide the biggest bang for the buck in the shortest amount of time. Knowing where there is the most unpredictability or the least reliable day to day operations probably tells them that they've got some work to do process wise and flow wise before they ever think about making those problems happen faster. I think the thing you should start doing tomorrow is understanding what your business is going to be in three to five years or at least creating a vision of what your business is gonna be in three to five years. And understand what things about how you currently operate will break. And if, you know, if today, you know, if your goal is to ship a thousand orders a day and today, no matter what, you can't ship more than 500, The first place you wanna look is what is my bottleneck? What is holding me back? And then break those down one by one by one. It's very difficult to say I'm just gonna change everything overnight. That usually doesn't work. In fact, it usually creates chaos. Across the conversation, one message held constant. Understand the whole operation, strengthen the process, and then automate with purpose. To discuss your own warehouse automation journey, we invite you to start a conversation with the LogistiVIEW team.
