Q&A with Dish Network: The Beginning of a Warehouse Automation Journey

DISH Network Corporation is a connectivity company that provides television entertainment and award-winning technology to millions of customers with its satellite DISH TV and streaming SLING TV services. In 2020, the company became a nationwide U.S. wireless carrier through the acquisition of Boost Mobile. DISH continues to innovate in wireless, building the nation’s first virtualized, O-RAN 5G broadband network.

DISH recently adopted automation and orchestration solutions from GreyOrange to improve its production operations. We asked a few members of the organization to talk to us about the deployment and DISH’s automation journey so far. 

What drove you to start looking at warehouse automation?

Bill Parent, Head of Engineering and Quality

Part of the culture at DISH is continuous improvement. We’re always looking to see how we can save not only money but also make our products better quality for our customers. So, we’re always looking to see how we can improve. And part of that is looking at technology. Recently, we’ve been looking at our processes that are manual and seeing how we can make them automated. 

Guillermo Ramirez, Head of Manufacturing & Distribution – West Operations

For us, adopting automation means putting ourselves in the best position to win with cutting-edge technology and being able to facilitate processes that are repetitive for our associates’ well-being. It’s good both for their ergonomics and for our optimization and efficiency. 

What warehouse process did you automate and why?

Meliza Almeraz, Manufacturing Engineer

We had the opportunity to automate the transportation of material. We looked at the different areas and different transportation processes that we had, and we selected the process of the water spider, which is a process that takes material from one site to different production cells.

Bill Parent

The AMR is really scalable to the business. We utilize the AMRs based on our needs. As part of DISH, you have to go through an ROI process. So, with these AMRs, we went through an analysis to say, “Here’s what the AMRs can do for us. They can bring this type of value, and based on the analysis, we’re able to say these AMRs are going to save us this amount of money over x amount of time.”

How was the deployment?

Juan E. Apodaca, Manufacturing Engineer

It went pretty good. It helped us a lot that GreyOrange was here to debug anything that happened during the implementation process. And it went smoothly. Hearing the feedback of the employees and having the team from GreyOrange here in the facility helped us.

Gerardo Moreno, Test Engineering Manager

Once the robots were here and the virtual machines and the servers were here and we started working with the GreyOrange team, it was just a matter of learning the software and how to manage the robots, which I think the the team has embraced very well.

How are the employees responding to the robots?

Guillermo Ramirez

There are always questions when it comes to integrating technology that looks like it might displace some of them (the employees), but I think communication is key. Answering “What are we doing? Why are we doing it” and giving them the opportunity to understand the benefits not only for the organization but for themselves.

Gabby, Warehouse Operator

Now that I have the AMR, it’s a lot easier for me. Pushing this cart meant moving 280 pounds. And with the AMR it’s been a lot easier. I can do more valuable stuff for me and for the company with the time that it gives me.

How have GreyMatter and its AI orchestration capabilities affected your operations?

Bill Parent

The automation is easier to work with. There’s a lot more AI that’s built into the robots. You get a little bit of the learnings from the automation, and they adapt to your environments.

Sean Pichardo, Test and Automation Engineer

GrayMatter is going to be working with our AMRs. GreyMatter is supposed to be the brains of the whole operation. For example, it determines what is the best route for the robots to take, and which is the best available robot to actually do the task.

Bill Parent

A lot of other robots, you program them and they go. It’s sort of static. The new generation, using GreyMatter, is more dynamic — you’re able to make adjustments on the fly. We can make changes as our environment changes around us. 

Sean Pichardo

GreyMatter takes care of everything and makes the AMRs a lot easier to work with because almost everything is automated by AI. It’s a great inclusion for the whole system.

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What results have you seen from robotic automation so far?

Guillermo Ramirez

They (our employees) can see the future happening now. But more than that they’re saying, “You know what? You were right. It’s better to have that little thing driving around and delivering material than some of us doing that day in and day out,” because it’s so repetitive and it’s so, I don’t want to say boring, but it’s not-so-engaging. Now, they have more engaging work to do every day and they get to learn new things rather than just push carts around.

Bill Parent

For DISH Network, it’s really about the efficiency of our operations. Improvement of operations and automation really helps drive that because we’re able to save money and really drive our processes to the value-added activities that we do within the company. 

Guillermo Ramirez

Seeing technology making processes more efficient — it makes us excited about what new technology we can integrate into our system to make it even better.

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