Lucas Systems helps companies transform their distribution centre by dramatically increasing worker productivity, operational agility, and customer and worker satisfaction using intelligent software with speech recognition and AI optimisation technologies.
Ken Ramoutar, Chief Marketing Officer at Lucas Systems, has been with Lucas for four years. He has spent most of his career in tech, with a lot of experience in the supply chain, and has previously worked for Accenture and for IBM in their e-commerce software group. He tells Warehouse & Logistics News about the company’s innovative speech recognition and optimisation technology, Jennifer, and about a major milestone Lucas recently reached.
Ken Ramoutar spoke to Warehouse & Logistics News.
Who does Lucas work with, what sectors do those customers work in and can you tell us a bit about the Lucas philosophy?
Lucas Systems, a software company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been in business for over 26 years. We have built a strong, industrial level, voice and optimisation technology that can be used in a warehouse environment to help with noise and other distractions that happen in a warehouse. We are in the distribution business, but we also have a lot of customers in the food and grocery sectors and in the manufacturing sector.
Over a number of years, voice has become accepted as an interface for frontline workers, allowing them to have their hands free, and eyes on what happens in a warehouse. Lucas has driven value through optimisation, helping workers to do their jobs, easier, faster and better by reducing walking time for the workers. Sometimes workers walk eight miles a day which can be tough, especially as the workforce ages. Lucas has very strong algorithms to reduce the travel and complete the work faster.
Our philosophy is to build and develop technologies for the warehouse worker, helping improve performance, reduce stress and be safer to make the job more enjoyable.
What can you tell me about Jennifer?
Jennifer is the brains and the voice of the entire system. She’s a virtual assistant that talks to workers, manages optimisation and the batching of work to best suit customer priorities. An e-commerce warehouse may have thousands of orders streaming in every hour. You have got to constantly sort out who will do the work, what is the priority and how to deploy the workforce to do the work in the most efficient way. Jennifer does all that, making thousands of decisions every minute that would be very difficult for a supervisor to manage. Jennifer takes the stress out the workforce, telling workers where to go and what to do, so for the worker it’s seamless and easy. Supervisors don’t have to decide who to give what orders to make sure the best customers get the best service. All that happens behind the scenes with Jennifer.
So, Jennifer makes things run smoother in the warehouse for clients?
Yes, we have seen a lot of value evolve in optimisation. There’s an opportunity to bring smarts into the warehouse, driving efficiency and throughput growth: customers want growth, to get more from their warehouse and not build another warehouse as that’s very expensive and capital-intensive. A big issue across the globe is finding enough workers.
Customers are being asked to do more in shorter windows with same day shipping commitments: if you order by 3pm, it gets shipped that day. These promises differentiate who you buy from.
Lucas addresses distribution challenges like labour, growing e-commerce business and meeting shorter delivery times. There is no tolerance for shipping the wrong orders, it’s expensive to pay for that shipping, unpack it and put it back on the shelf.
With automation, robotics and technology growing in the warehousing and logistics sector, how is Lucas responding?
We have experienced a lot of new things in the warehouse automation space. Distributors recognise the need to automate, but what automation should they use? Automation varies from robotics that can do certain tasks very well, to machinery such as large scale conveyor systems and the ASRS. One thing that we do know is that we don’t see the workers coming out of the warehouse space for a long time and we remain focused on the workers.
There is promise in new tech like robotics, but there’s still a long way to go before robots can do many things that humans can do. They move pallets around and do long hauls well, but we are still a long way off from sending a robot down an aisle and trying to pick 150 lines an hour, especially if there’s 50 parts in a little plastic bag.
A good ecosystem is building out there. Lucas certainly works well with robots, and as a software company, we have integrated various robotic systems where humans hand things over to robots. The real message is about orchestrating various technologies together, with humans still involved, but robots moving some of the big pallets. Lucas is investing time and energy in making that ecosystem work.
Can you tell us about the major milestone Lucas recently reached?
Yes, it’s an achievement we are very proud of, one that’s taken 26 years of evolution. We have reached 100 billion picks using Jennifer, that’s roughly 17 million picks a day. We are proud of this as Lucas has evolved the business and its technologies. We have longevity in the business and we have built new and interesting things that add value to the distribution space. We are a good partner for our customers, and many have been with us for over 20 years which means we have both had to evolve during this time. There have been many innovations over those years and you can now use Jennifer in over 30 languages. For example, a warehouse might have one person speaking in Spanish and another speaking in Arabic right next to each other, but by using Jennifer it opens up your labour force and your hiring, if your area has certain ethnic populations who can’t work elsewhere because they can’t speak English at the required speed. That makes it more attractive to work in a warehouse.
What is the future looking like for Lucas?
We see a continued evolution in distribution. I think we are only at the first quarter of this transformation that is going to happen over the next 10 to 20 years. We remain focused on the workforce as being a critical resource for our customers. An interesting thing that we are looking at and that is coming to fruition is ‘gamification’ and bringing that into the warehouse. There are challenges in the warehouse, such as finding and keeping labour, and rising wages. Our customers are trying to engage their workforce and Jennifer can bring more game mechanics into the day-to-day work with contests, feedback, competition and incentives to engage the entire workforce through technology, making the workday a lot more interesting and fun. Customers tell us they may want to put this in place.
What new developments are you working on?
Keeping the warehouse agile and dynamic will be critical. We are working on dynamic slotting, that helps put products in the right places. We are giving warehouse and distribution operators the ability to be very flexible and dynamic, taking the workload off the management team, and that’s where the smarts come in.
Companies have to build in agility to deal with situations beyond their control. Can Lucas help with that?
Yes, it’s core to our philosophy of giving customers the ability to make changes or have the system recommend what to do. Jennifer tells supervisors and managers where the orders are, will I complete the work today, can I predict based on current rates where I’ll be at the end of this shift? You need a system constantly giving visibility and data, because it could make the difference between an unhappy customer or one you have made happy through our tools and technology.
Lucas Systems
0289 600 2852
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