AUTOMATION RIGHT: Robust.AI’s Carter Pro is a collaborative robot that enhances flexible logistics workflow DHL’S US$2.1BN INVESTMENT Sally Miller, global CIO, DHL Supply Chain How much have you invested in automation in recent years? In the past few years we’ve spent around €2bn (US$2.1bn) across all the divisions. In Supply Chain specifically, we have had an accelerated digitalization agenda focusing on 12 key areas that will influence our operations – everything from robotics and data analytics to autonomous vehicles and any type of wearable where we can capture data to digitalize our business. The amount of venture capital funding going into supply chain technologies has increased dramatically over the past five to seven years. We are well positioned to monitor that space and focus on what will improve our operations – that is how we approach investment. Supply chain providers typically operate on tight margins and may not always be at the forefront of adopting the latest technology. Yet, DHL Supply Chain is leading the industry in applying technology and innovation to our sites. UNTIL YOU IMPLEMENT SOMETHING AND GO THROUGH IT, YOU DON’T HAVE A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPACT” Sally Miller, DHL Supply Chain We’ve also used Gen AI in certain back-office activities, and we have enabled our associates to have access to this Gen AI in a more secure environment. We invested early to take advantage of the latest technologies, taking Gen AI and creating a secure environment for our data. What technologies are you focusing on? We prioritize technologies that deliver immediate value to our customers, are mature enough for large-scale deployment and enhance the experience and efficiency of our people. This includes mobile robotic solutions. We have 7,500 bots deployed across the globe, which is second only to Amazon in terms of providers. Amazon has it a bit easier because all of their operations look the same, but at DHL Supply Chain we supply a variety of market verticals, from healthcare to apparel to consumer electronic goods, automotive, etc, so the profiles of our operations don’t all look the same. Therefore, it is very important that we focus on the technologies that can scale, and that we can deploy across multiple operations. Across the last year, mobile robotics has led the category. Next up is AI. We’ve been leveraging machine learning in specific use cases, exploring how we decide when to count inventory. Looking at it from a different approach, we take data from different systems and develop an algorithm using machine learning to focus the labor on the areas where we’re most likely to have an error. It is exciting to be using the latest technology against such core processes that we’ve had for years, and working out how we can leverage data that we have in different systems to do those processes more efficiently. Which providers are you working with and how do you choose them? We have an innovation funnel where we take research ideas that come from existing vendors, vendors we might see at a trade show, from academia, wherever we find out about these technologies, and we look to take the product from initial interaction through to scaling. The first thing we do is understand what the solution is – that might sound basic, but a lot of these companies are startups, and they have an idea that isn’t fully baked yet, so sometimes we will get involved with them very early on. Boston Dynamics is a good example of that. You see some of their videos of humanoid robots running through the forest, which is a bit scary, or you see the robotic dog – they wanted to develop supply chain robotics products, and we were very impressed because they are the leaders in robotics, but they don’t know anything about supply chain. So, working with them on carton unloading was how we co-developed the Stretch robot, which is a robotic arm that takes cartons out of the back of a trailer and puts them on a conveyor. This is a very manual-intensive job for frontline workers – if it is hot and you’ve got trailer after trailer, it is not something we have a high number of potential employees wanting to do. So, picking 26 www.ParcelandPostalTechnologyInternational.com March 2025
Parcel and Postal Technology International March 2025 Issue : Page 26
