Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Retail Technologies, 2024
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Numerous vendors. Myriad SKUs.
Gone are the days when a single manufacturer or vendor in the same geography supplies all the key SKUs to its end customers. The globalization of the supply chain has made retailers and wholesalers of industrial products evolve their fulfillment processes. You’re keeping up with a complex supply chain by becoming even more efficient. Among the many challenges you face, four are top-of-mind:
Supplying goods to different geographies and market segments ramps up your SKU variability. From small ones in inners, to larger ones in cases, SKU proliferation has made it even harder to make your fulfillment process efficient.
It’s critical for suppliers to exercise SKU traceability across various manufacturing units and geographies. For example, a power tool may have slight variations in its internal build, so it’s necessary to have full inventory trackability and control in order to run fulfillment operations and assemble the tool efficiently.
Fulfilling different orders – some to be shipped in cases, others on entire pallets – is fundamentally challenging. Building rainbow pallets – which follow business rules and accommodate myriad SKUs – adds further complexity.
Efficiently storing and picking orders requires a consistent process and optimal storage across areas. Making this happen is no small feat. The key is to establish fulfillment operations that consolidate parts of orders fulfilled from different areas by applying optimal bottleneck management.
GreyMatter, the GreyOrange multi-agent orchestration platform, automates the fulfillment process end-to-end. The GreyMatter fulfillment platform lets you move pallet loads via our intralogistics bots – or fulfill orders using assisted picking and goods-to-person solutions – to solve all the complexities of the fulfillment process. GreyMatter solves your fulfillment challenges with various solutions including.
GreyMatter automation agents handle all SKU sizes – from a small case of nuts and bolts, to a large SKU like a power tool – allowing you to move away from manual handling products. The flexible nature of automating using our AMRs helps you overcome the huge SKU variability.
GreyMatter tracks lots for all SKUs in the inventory, and applies business rules to fulfill your orders. So you can fulfill specific orders with a specific lot, or maintain a FIFO logic to the fulfillment process.
Using a combination of agents or picking processes, GreyMatter lets you fulfill any type, shape or size of order. You don’t have to worry about having a fixed capacity for different processes. The same picker can build pallets with the right business rules – such as picking the heaviest items first, fragile items at the end, and order-picking cases according to demand fluctuations. In every scenario, our fulfillment platform intelligently adapts to process the right orders from the same resource pool, so no SLAs are missed.
With GreyMatter waveless fulfillment, you don’t have to worry about waving between areas and manually orchestrating process flows. Our system coordinates agents in the process flow to produce the right output. The result is that orders are completed with an end-to-end-flow that combines picking and consolidation. No more manually scheduling your staging or dedicating extra resources to double-handling orders.
