Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to see a real case study with proper metrics about these customer use cases. We try not to report stories that are foo foo. What I’m looking for is the impact. For one thing, is this a pilot in one store at Macy’s or is this something that is being deployed across multiple stores? Is this something that is actually showing real uplift in sales?

Tom Bianculli: There’s an impact for sure.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re seeing a trend of retailers adopting certain IoT capabilities to alert their floor sales staff to go talk to potential purchasers while lingering in shelves. Is there any other use case that you want to highlight where you’re seeing such behavioural change using IoT capabilities?

Tom Bianculli: The general notion is visibility gaps, but where those exist is where these opportunities are in IoT. Another example would be in the freight industry, specifically in cross-dock situation where you have goods coming in on pallets. They’re in bulk and those get broken down and get distributed. In North America, that less-than-truckload industry is about a $35 billion industry.

Two interesting facts though. About 8% of the revenue of that $35 billion is not captured because the cross-dock facilities and the carriers can’t capture the dimensional data of the freight. They’re not able to accurately charge their customers based on weight and dimension. They do get weight data but they don’t have the dimensional data as they’re moving through the facility. You can contrast this with parcel. In the parcel space, they do weight-based billing today because parcels can be conveyed. They get weighed and they get dimension. The pallets don’t have that ability. That’s 8% loss on a $35 billion industry.

Additionally, we see the fork trucks in these kinds of facilities, which is a pretty chaotic environment. They have about 40% utilization. That means, 60% of the time, those trucks are driving around with no load on the forks. The reason for that is they don’t know where things are located. They’re spending time looking for them. They’re doing point-to-point loading. A particular fork truck operator is loading one vehicle and then driving back to a centralized staging area and then driving back to that one vehicle again.

What we’re working on right now is something called smart freight. The IoT play there is to instrument the entire cross-dock environment. We’re able to put an infrastructure that allows these facilities to dimension their pallets and locate them in real time. By doing this, they know where every pallet is located. They’re able to dimension every pallet. They know where every pallet is located. As a result of that, they can send that fork truck driver to make the next best move at a particular point in time to drive the asset utilization well above 40%.

We’re on pilot on this stuff. The industry is clamouring for solutions that can do this sort of thing. With regard to dimensioning, we should be able to recover almost the full 8% of lost revenue there. Then in the case of locationing, we’re doing the studies now but getting from 40% utilization up to 60% is quite a reasonable expectation.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies
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