Interest in warehouse automation in was on full display at the MODEX 2024 trade show held in in mid-March in Atlanta.
The bi-annual trade show and conference saw blowout attendance and exhibitor numbers, with almost 49,000 registrants – an incredible number, and up 32% from the last MODEX in 2022. That according to show producer MHI - once known as the Materials Handling Institute of America.
For much of the show the aisles were packed.
At the show, Roboteon spoke with more than 100 attendees at our large booth in hall C, and identified some interesting trends we think are worth sharing.
Other companies were looking at the bigger picture and understood the value of using a software platform not only to handle the core integration, but also enable advanced execution functionality, and to easily add robots of different types and/or from different vendors over time (interoperability), rather than being locked into a particular robot vendor’s software.
Case in point: We spoke with an IT manager for a major high tech company, who told us he was supporting nine different point-to-point robot integrations, which was a real issue for the company in terms of orchestrating workflow, and greatly limited on-going flexibility. This is not a “happy path.”
The good news: Roboteon has a warehouse robotics software platform available right now to address these and other challenges and opportunities. Gartner uses the term “Multi-agent Orchestration (MAO) Platforms” to categorize this newer type of software, driven by robotics. We don’t know if that term itself will stick, but the capabilities it includes most certainly will. We like to think of our solution as MAO+.
It’s an exciting time for distribution and manufacturing managers, with all these automation choices to consider. Demand for such automation is clearly strong, but the process is often taking longer than it should . Other companies are not looking at the pig picture in terms of adding other robots and orchestrating flows across heterogeneous automation environments.
An overarching robotic software platform may be just the ticket for accelerating proof of concept trials, actual deployments, and time-to-value, while maximizing system throughput and cost reduction achievable with robotics.
Let’s discuss your challenges and opportunities for warehouse and manufacturing robotic automation soon.
In our next blog, we’ll share some additional very insightful trends as seen by leading analyst firm Interact Analysis.
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