SECTOR
Manufacturing and Energy
ACTIVITY
For its 48,000 sq m Newlog DC warehouse, Schneider Electric was looking for an application that would provide real-time insights into performance against its customer promise: to deliver certain orders within two hours. The firm used Vision Insights—an automatic image recognition application that generates a digital twin from input data—to digitize and supervise what had previously been a manual process. The application gives Schneider Electric end-to-end traceability of all pallet flows within its warehouse. The company plans to deploy it at other warehouses.
The project at a glance
Several years ago, Rexel adopted “More Customers, More SKUs, More Digital,” a new approach that aims to harness digital technology to boost value creation. Work on this front accelerated in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The retailer’s longstanding information system is based on a legacy IBM AS/400 architecture. This system was not designed to address the challenges of 24/7 BtoB e-commerce, or more generally to be compatible with digital sales and operations, including the rapid development and deployment of new tools and applications.
Hardis Group, which has maintained Rexel’s legacy system since 2004—including through Adelia—is now helping the retailer gradually transform its information system and shift to a modular architecture, to help the company accelerate its transformation to a digital, omnichannel retail model.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- Digitizing and optimizing a manual process.
- Automatically recognizing images of pallets stored at loading docks, captured by cameras installed in the warehouse.
- Generating a real-time digital twin of the pallets present at each dock.
- Receiving alerts whenever pallets are left waiting for too long at a dock.
WORK PERFORMED
- Joint development of Vision Insights to assess the potential of a new automatic image recognition system for process digitization.
BENEFITS
- End-to-end traceability of all pallet flows within the warehouse.
- Real-time insights, via a digital status report, of the number of pallets at each loading dock.
- Alerts whenever a pallet is left waiting for too long at a loading dock.
- Detailed data that can be exploited to support ongoing process optimization.
