Qlik Connect 2024 | Scott Hertel | UPS

theCUBE.net

Clips
News
More from Qlik Connect 2024

Scott Hertel

Director - Product Solutions and Strategy (Global Fulfillment)

UPS

Robotics, AI and data visualization solutions among the highlights at Qlik Connect

The Qlik Connect gathering in Orlando brought together a wide range of customers and company executives who offered their perspectives on how robotics, AI and data visualization solutions from QlikTech International AB and associated partners were making a difference.One of these perspectives came from United Parcel Service Inc., the global shipping company. UPS has its own Supply Chain Solutions division that provides freight forwarding and warehousing services for multiple clients, and the firm showcased its robotic solution as part of the Qlik Connect showcase.TheCUBE research analysts discuss key highlights from Qlik Connect

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Work with Robotics, AI, and Automation: A Deep Dive into UPS's Successful Transformation

Info

Scott Hertel | UPS

Scott Hertel

Director - Product Solutions and Strategy (Global Fulfillment) UPS

search

>> Good afternoon and welcome back to Qlik Connect. We're here in Orlando, Florida for a day of power-packed coverage on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be joined by Scott from UPS and a robot for this segment. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time today.

>> Thanks for having me. Thanks for stopping by.

>> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks to our little robot here for taking time for us as well. Tell me a little bit about your role at UPS.

>> So I have responsibility for strategy and product development for our global fulfillment business. So it's a business that most people don't necessarily associate with UPS, but in addition to global transportation and parcel deliveries, we run a global fulfillment operation for retailers, service parts for both forward and reverse logistics.

>> Wow. I don't even think that I was aware of that.

>> Yeah, there you go.

>> No wonder that you've built our little friend here. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

>> Sure. So really over the last four to five years, we've transformed our business, leaned heavily into robotics, AI, automation, both to improve our service to our customers, scalability, reduced some of the pressure from a labor market. Coming out of COVID, it was really difficult to find the workforce that's required. So we have a couple of global strategic partnerships from a robotics perspective that we've deployed within our warehouses, and we've really integrated that with AI and data providers providing an end-to-end solution, giving our customers really total access across the end-to-end supply chain, taking what's happening on the warehouse floor and bringing it to their laptop, to their mobile phone to see what's happening in their supply chain.

>> I think that's so important. So what was the decision tree like to decide you needed to make this particular robot?

>> Well, really industry forces. So changes in market demand and consumer expectations, shift, continued growth in e-commerce, which is a different supply chain solution. It's a lot more labor-intensive, requires a lot more space. So we knew we needed some different technology solutions, really different operating solutions to be able to continue to support our customers and help them grow in new channels and new markets and support their sales growth where it was happening.

>> So what does this do exactly?

>> So this is through one of our partners, Locus Robotics. So it's basically a pick assist robot. So it's deployed within our network and essentially all the order queue. So we get all of our orders in. It looks at the overall order pool, runs some AI and analytics on it to basically optimize the pick route within the warehouse. So by totes, by bot, it creates allocated orders on the right skew mix and then creates a route within the warehouse that it travels and it allows our associates to really stay in their zone and reduces travel. They no longer have to push and pull carts and all that, but there's quality control metrics to ensure we're picking the right product. And it's also available in 40 different languages. So as our associates walk up to the bot, it reads their tag. So it associates their individual user profile-

>> Which is so cool....

>> and displays the information in their native language, which helps us from a recruiting and a retention perspective, really makes the environment comfortable and inviting, and makes it easier for them to integrate and be a part of the team.

>> Yeah, I was just going to ask, what's the team's response been to AI and robotics?

>> They love it. They love it.

>> Your eyes light up when you said that. That's great. That's very genuine.

>> We've got the video rolling in the back, and if the audio was on, you'll hear the people talking about, "Oh, we love working with the bots." And we really call them co-bots because they're working with our team, working with their associates. It takes a lot of the negative parts of the job, the pushing and the pulling and lifting and walking, puts that-

>> The backache, I feel like.

>> Puts that emphasis on the bots and lets our team members do the things that we need a human to do, to manage the inventory and ensure we're picking the right product, and gives them an environment. There's some cool gaming technology in here where they can track their productivity and see how they rank on a daily basis.

>> Oh, fun. Give the buddies a little jab if they're a little more efficient.

>> Compete against one another throughout the day.

>> Yeah, yeah. Somebody gets a little bonus at lunch or whatever.

>> That's right.

>> Oh, I love that. That's great. Co-bot, I haven't heard that term before. I think that actually makes it really approachable and digestible, especially when we're in this kind of hype curve moment that's happening.

>> I mean, all of the innovation, it's really about where the digital meets the physical and how you bring that together in both a efficient operating environment, but also usable data and analytics that we can use to make better decisions.

>> Yeah, that's awesome. Tell me a little bit about the partnership with Qlik. I imagine you've got a lot of data on that warehouse.

>> We do. So we're partnering with Click really in kind of three different ways. So we leverage them in our global transportation control tower, looking for our customers that have a global supply chain around order status, inventory status, transportation delivery status, providing one place to see all of that and use within our control tower to not only understand performance levels, but really interject and intervene where there may be a problem, gives us some advanced notification to be able to do that. From a small package perspective with Intelligent Analytics, we use Qlik as really providing that data around our customers' shipping profile, shipping weights, packages, trends, zones, all of that so that they can more easily understand their business, understand trends and profiles in their data, and then we leverage it internally for a lot of internal analytics and reporting analysis on our customers and our business performance.

>> I love it. That sounds pretty hardy. So you've been working together for a little while.

>> Yeah, I think the relationship has been three to four years kind of in the making so far.

>> Oh, nice.

>> Yeah.

>> That's great. All right, taking off your UPS hat for our final question.

>> Sure.

>> What do you hope, just as a human being, AI brings into our future world? It could be a lot of things.

>> It could be a lot of things. That's an interesting question. So I mean, at the end of the day, I hope it allows us to make connections more quickly, to continue to not only improve supply chains, improve business performance, help companies succeed, but also helps us solve tough problems. And if I think about where it could go in the future and the multitude of use cases, there's an impact on business, there's an impact on consumers, but also just in our neighbors and global population. So I think the use cases are kind of unending. It'll be an interesting journey to see where we ultimately land, but it's a ton of innovation. It's an exciting time.

>> Yes, it is.

>> And yeah, it's good to be on the forefront of it.

>> It certainly is. Now, I told you earlier when I came by to say hello, that we were going to ask Twitter what to name this beautiful bot.

>> Oh, did we get a response?

>> We got quite a few responses actually, but I think the winner was actually from Qlik themselves and they wanted to call it the Dispatch Droid or DD.

>> DD.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> This is our little droid friend. I love it. Scott, this has been a great chat.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you. I really appreciate it.

>> I appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

>> Oh yes, my pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to our live coverage here at Qlik Connect in Orlando, Florida. We've got wonderful, brilliant people. We've got robots, folks, you don't want to miss it. We're all day live. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Scott Hertel | UPS

search

>> Good afternoon and welcome back to Qlik Connect. We're here in Orlando, Florida for a day of power-packed coverage on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be joined by Scott from UPS and a robot for this segment. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time today.

>> Thanks for having me. Thanks for stopping by.

>> Yeah, absolutely. And thanks to our little robot here for taking time for us as well. Tell me a little bit about your role at UPS.

>> So I have responsibility for strategy and product development for our global fulfillment business. So it's a business that most people don't necessarily associate with UPS, but in addition to global transportation and parcel deliveries, we run a global fulfillment operation for retailers, service parts for both forward and reverse logistics.

>> Wow. I don't even think that I was aware of that.

>> Yeah, there you go.

>> No wonder that you've built our little friend here. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

>> Sure. So really over the last four to five years, we've transformed our business, leaned heavily into robotics, AI, automation, both to improve our service to our customers, scalability, reduced some of the pressure from a labor market. Coming out of COVID, it was really difficult to find the workforce that's required. So we have a couple of global strategic partnerships from a robotics perspective that we've deployed within our warehouses, and we've really integrated that with AI and data providers providing an end-to-end solution, giving our customers really total access across the end-to-end supply chain, taking what's happening on the warehouse floor and bringing it to their laptop, to their mobile phone to see what's happening in their supply chain.

>> I think that's so important. So what was the decision tree like to decide you needed to make this particular robot?

>> Well, really industry forces. So changes in market demand and consumer expectations, shift, continued growth in e-commerce, which is a different supply chain solution. It's a lot more labor-intensive, requires a lot more space. So we knew we needed some different technology solutions, really different operating solutions to be able to continue to support our customers and help them grow in new channels and new markets and support their sales growth where it was happening.

>> So what does this do exactly?

>> So this is through one of our partners, Locus Robotics. So it's basically a pick assist robot. So it's deployed within our network and essentially all the order queue. So we get all of our orders in. It looks at the overall order pool, runs some AI and analytics on it to basically optimize the pick route within the warehouse. So by totes, by bot, it creates allocated orders on the right skew mix and then creates a route within the warehouse that it travels and it allows our associates to really stay in their zone and reduces travel. They no longer have to push and pull carts and all that, but there's quality control metrics to ensure we're picking the right product. And it's also available in 40 different languages. So as our associates walk up to the bot, it reads their tag. So it associates their individual user profile-

>> Which is so cool....

>> and displays the information in their native language, which helps us from a recruiting and a retention perspective, really makes the environment comfortable and inviting, and makes it easier for them to integrate and be a part of the team.

>> Yeah, I was just going to ask, what's the team's response been to AI and robotics?

>> They love it. They love it.

>> Your eyes light up when you said that. That's great. That's very genuine.

>> We've got the video rolling in the back, and if the audio was on, you'll hear the people talking about, "Oh, we love working with the bots." And we really call them co-bots because they're working with our team, working with their associates. It takes a lot of the negative parts of the job, the pushing and the pulling and lifting and walking, puts that-

>> The backache, I feel like.

>> Puts that emphasis on the bots and lets our team members do the things that we need a human to do, to manage the inventory and ensure we're picking the right product, and gives them an environment. There's some cool gaming technology in here where they can track their productivity and see how they rank on a daily basis.

>> Oh, fun. Give the buddies a little jab if they're a little more efficient.

>> Compete against one another throughout the day.

>> Yeah, yeah. Somebody gets a little bonus at lunch or whatever.

>> That's right.

>> Oh, I love that. That's great. Co-bot, I haven't heard that term before. I think that actually makes it really approachable and digestible, especially when we're in this kind of hype curve moment that's happening.

>> I mean, all of the innovation, it's really about where the digital meets the physical and how you bring that together in both a efficient operating environment, but also usable data and analytics that we can use to make better decisions.

>> Yeah, that's awesome. Tell me a little bit about the partnership with Qlik. I imagine you've got a lot of data on that warehouse.

>> We do. So we're partnering with Click really in kind of three different ways. So we leverage them in our global transportation control tower, looking for our customers that have a global supply chain around order status, inventory status, transportation delivery status, providing one place to see all of that and use within our control tower to not only understand performance levels, but really interject and intervene where there may be a problem, gives us some advanced notification to be able to do that. From a small package perspective with Intelligent Analytics, we use Qlik as really providing that data around our customers' shipping profile, shipping weights, packages, trends, zones, all of that so that they can more easily understand their business, understand trends and profiles in their data, and then we leverage it internally for a lot of internal analytics and reporting analysis on our customers and our business performance.

>> I love it. That sounds pretty hardy. So you've been working together for a little while.

>> Yeah, I think the relationship has been three to four years kind of in the making so far.

>> Oh, nice.

>> Yeah.

>> That's great. All right, taking off your UPS hat for our final question.

>> Sure.

>> What do you hope, just as a human being, AI brings into our future world? It could be a lot of things.

>> It could be a lot of things. That's an interesting question. So I mean, at the end of the day, I hope it allows us to make connections more quickly, to continue to not only improve supply chains, improve business performance, help companies succeed, but also helps us solve tough problems. And if I think about where it could go in the future and the multitude of use cases, there's an impact on business, there's an impact on consumers, but also just in our neighbors and global population. So I think the use cases are kind of unending. It'll be an interesting journey to see where we ultimately land, but it's a ton of innovation. It's an exciting time.

>> Yes, it is.

>> And yeah, it's good to be on the forefront of it.

>> It certainly is. Now, I told you earlier when I came by to say hello, that we were going to ask Twitter what to name this beautiful bot.

>> Oh, did we get a response?

>> We got quite a few responses actually, but I think the winner was actually from Qlik themselves and they wanted to call it the Dispatch Droid or DD.

>> DD.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> This is our little droid friend. I love it. Scott, this has been a great chat.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you. I really appreciate it.

>> I appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

>> Oh yes, my pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to our live coverage here at Qlik Connect in Orlando, Florida. We've got wonderful, brilliant people. We've got robots, folks, you don't want to miss it. We're all day live. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.