Breathe Technologies is a systems integrator and long-term partner for retail and eCommerce fulfilment operations. Breathe brings together its proprietary software platform BreatheIQ with a partner portfolio that includes robotics, sorters, wearables and more providing end to end solutions based around each customer’s specific operation.
Managing Director
at Breathe Technologies
Simon Allen, Managing Director at Breathe Technologies talks to Warehouse & Logistics News.
How would you describe Breathe’s role in the market?
We partner with our customers to solve a business problem, and the technology follows from that. Our customers are under real pressure with rising costs, and the struggle to recruit and retain reliable labour. They don’t wake up wanting to buy anautomation system; they wake up needing to protect margin, meet service levels and build a five-year plan that stands up to scrutiny. Our job is to understand that commercial context first, then design and integrate the right solution around it. Being technology agnostic is central to this. We’re not tied to any single manufacturer, so we can genuinely recommend what’s best for the customer.
ROI is often the hurdle. How do you help customers build a case that stands up?
Almost all customers we work with need to demonstrate ROI inside a fixed window, typically 2 to 3 years. We help them build that business case in two ways. Firstly, by scoping the right size solution that can be scaled up as their business grows. This limits the investment required to the genuine operational need, rather than a higher cost over engineered solution that would only be partially utilised for most of the time. Our partner portfolio includes; Libiao Robotics, Strongpoint AutoStore and others which lets us recommend the right solution and scale in phases. Secondly, by making the performance of the solution visible and measurable from day one. That’s where our software platform, BreatheIQ, comes in. It gives customers the operational insights to prove the ROI case is being delivered, and the ability to keep optimising after go-live. Automation that isn’t measured tends to drift; automation that’s continuously optimised keeps paying back well beyond the ROI period.
Tell us about BreatheIQ, where does it sit, and what does it actually do?
BreatheIQ is our proprietary high-level execution software. It sits between the automation and the WMS, orchestrating the operation from end to end. In practical terms, it optimises how the automation runs, how work is sequenced, and how people and machines interact and it provides real-time operational insight that lets site leaders make better decisions, faster. That’s what turns a collection of automation assets into a single, coherent operation. It’s also what protects the ROI over time, because performance is continuously monitored and tuned rather than assumed. Part of BreatheIQ is our standalone picking optimisation module, PickIQ, which is designed specifically for manual picking operations. It’s helping teams improve their picker productivity by optimising the picking sequencing to reduce walking distance, reduce wasted space in cartons or totes, and a number of other optimisation benefits.
Your partner portfolio has grown significantly in the last couple of years.
Over the last two years we’ve deliberately expanded our partner portfolio so we can bring genuinely flexible, modular, scalable solutions to our customers, including Libiao for robotic sortation and Strongpoint for AutoStore, alongside our longstanding automation partners. What ties it together is BreatheIQ as the orchestration layer and our integration expertise as the delivery engine. The result is that we can design a solution around the customer’s operation rather than squeezing the operation into a fixed product. Customers can begin with one module or system, prove the ROI, and expand with confidence knowing everything will integrate and be optimised by the same software layer. For us these are long-term partnerships. Many of our customers have been with us for 5–10 years, and because we’re technology agnostic, that relationship gives them flexibility as their business and the market evolve rather than tying them to a single manufacturer.
What’s your view on where retail and eCommerce fulfilment is heading over the next few years?
I think there are three things. Firstly, modular, scalable automation will become the default, customers want the ability to phase investment, flex with demand, and avoid being locked into a single automation system for a decade. Secondly, software becomes the real differentiator. The automation hardware market is maturing quickly, and the competitive edge now comes from how intelligently that hardware is orchestrated and how much operational insight you get out of it. Thirdly, the definition of “value” is changing. Five years ago, the conversation was about throughput; now it’s about labour, traceability, control and margin protection, and crucially, the ability to prove all of that with data. Our role is to be the partner that helps customers navigate that change; bringing the right technology, the right software and the right commercial thinking to make their long term plan achievable.
Breathe Technologies
01925 742888
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