Nothing is black and white when it comes to automation and digital transformation projects.

Automation software is highly complex and needs to be written ‘elegantly to allow for highly dynamic and flexible warehouse environments.

Most customers want to select their hardware vendors solution first. Customers will usually then ‘embrace’ the software platform the automation vendors propose without any thorough research. The claim from the automation hardware vendors is that “our software is best ‘tailored’ to our hardware and is most optimal for ‘scaling’ into the future”.

However, in our extensive experience most automation projects ‘underachieve’ and underperform in productivity, flexibility, and various associated costs. Why is this? Here are some possible answers:

• Software takes a ‘back seat’ until the late stages of a project and is not subject to a thorough review.

• Most customers don’t allow enough time and resources to the future specifications of the final design of the warehouse software ‘ecosystem’.

• Engineers from various hardware components are challenged to make software work and properly connect all the final hardware components within project timelines.

• When purchasing the software solution from the hardware vendors, there is high probability you will not be able to use all the features in some of the systems and more importantly future upgrades will be complex and expensive.

• Users are unable to take advantage of all the new features in future upgrades because the different automation vendors do not collaborate with each other and have different agendas for the future.

Conversely, customers who select their software partners first before finalizing the automation hardware components are seeing a much higher success rate in their digital transformation automation projects.