Challenge

How might we enhance worker productivity in warehouses using latest technology (augmented reality & image recognition)?

Today’s companies are more and more influenced by the individualization of products and services. In the past, companies drove their product portfolio to meet the needs of certain customer segment. Nowadays, customers are pushing the companies to offer highly configurable products and services. This shift leads to dramatic changes in many internal processing steps within the company. The term ‘lot size of one’ is present in almost every department. A common example is the ever-accelerating shift to ecommerce. Here, customers are expecting to have the possibility to configure the product or at least choose from different variants. And in the shipping process, tracking and tracing of individual parcels is a standard today.

All these changes are also hitting the warehouses which are the backbones of almost every company. While automation is already a big topic since decades, many processes within the warehouses are still very labor-intensive. Examples are picking or receiving goods. Since the demand for individualized products will further accelerate, the warehouses need to heavily enhance their productivity to handle the upcoming workload while further reducing the operational costs.

With new technologies getting ready for the business use, e.g. augmented reality and image recognition, the productivity in warehouse could be substantially increased. Helping the warehouse personal to navigate to the right product location or easily transferring information from packages and pallets into the system, would be of great benefit. Even more, if the system could recognize damaged goods or wrong placements without human interaction would avoid labor-intensive rework afterwards.

Examples of possible use cases:

• find the correct bin as well as the correct product to be picked.

• automatically confirm a task by recognizing the movement.

• Verify that the correct product is picked

• Display the bin location in the AR glasses

• …