In the July issue of Modern Materials Handling magazine (MMH), senior editor Roberto Michel wrote a featured article on “Warehouse Execution Systems (WES): Blending human-centered workflows with automation.”

Dan Gilmore, chief marketing officer at Roboteon, is quoted extensively in the MMH piece.

Michel writes “Not all WES are alike, but generally, they provide functionality such as load balancing and automation-aware order release,” to which Gilmore responds as highlighted below:

“I think we all agree we’re moving toward increasingly heterogeneous environments for automation,” says Dan Gilmore, chief marketing officer with Roboteon, which offers a robotics fulfillment platform with WES capabilities. “Not every company is there yet in terms of using multiple systems, but more are thinking they’ll be using multiple solutions, and those solutions will need to talk to each other, most importantly, to optimize the flow though the facility, which is where the orchestration concept comes in. I think it’s fair to say that WES is about maximizing that flow. There are capabilities needed underneath that, but in general, you should be talking to vendors who understand the flow of a distribution center and have tools and capabilities in their software to maximize total throughput.”

Later in the article, Gilmore is quoted more extensively:

“When it comes to judging WES, look for advanced functionality around orchestration and simulation”, says Gilmore. “Make sure there is some real substance to the solution,” he adds.

Areas that Roboteon has focused on with its platform include its orchestration engine, including AI-based task assignment to eliminate wasted time and handoffs between systems, as well warehouse workflow simulation. The simulation in the platform can be used for longer term plans such as number of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) needed for a peak season, or to estimate picking costs under multiple robot parameters, though it also works during order release to orchestrate across current resources to optimize overall flow, Gilmore explains.

“Simulation allows the system to consider all the different possibilities across thousands of configurations and conditions and say, ‘OK, when the conditions look like this, this is the best way for the work to be released for this block of time,’” Gilmore says.

Vendors also need expertise in integrating with different systems and monitoring the current status and capacity of systems, Gilmore adds.

“WES vendors need integration expertise between the WES and whatever is on the other side, whether that’s traditional automation or robotic goods-to-person systems, or mobile robot systems,” he says. “You’ve got to have a platform that enables you to integrate with those things very easily and rapidly, and that is reusable.”

The main aim of WES, Gilmore adds, is to avoid bottlenecks to enable a smooth flow of work. For example, you don’t want a robotic palletizing cell waiting on cases delivered from an AMR system, but you don’t want so many AMR missions that work piles up in front the palletizing cell, which might lead to staging delays or congestion.

“One of the things that WES can do is to alleviate those bottlenecks and improve the flow by smartly understanding what work is there and what work is coming and being able to meter that work in a way that maximizes the total throughput of the system, not each individual piece,” Gilmore says.

Going forward, Gilmore says, more companies will want an orchestration platform that is hardware agnostic and reuseable, meaning it can integrate with robotic or automation systems from different vendors, with perhaps one DC or region using one brand of AMRs, but a different brand of AMRs in another site or region.

“You want a high level of flexibility to add new vendors or new types of equipment more easily and plug it into a framework that allows you to have interoperability across robot fleets,” Gilmore says.

The interesting full MMH article can be accessed on its web site here:

https://www.mmh.com/article/warehouse_execution_system_wms_blending_human_centered_workflows_with_automation