ProMat C-Suite Interview: Mark Dunaway, President of North America at Kardex Remstar

Q: What is your number one takeaway from ProMat 2019?

Mark Dunaway: Automation and robots were gangbusters at the show. There was so much more of both on display than we’ve ever seen in the past. We seem to have crossed a threshold from talking about automation to seeing it used much more widely. Automation has always been big in Europe and now it seems to be catching on with similar intensity in the U.S. Furthermore, there are younger people moving into management positions today and many of them are more open to automation.

Q: What are the three key market trends from your perspective?

Mark Dunaway: The labor shortage is the headliner. The majority of people who came into our booth at ProMat first talked about their labor situation. They came looking for automation as a way to supplement human labor or stabilize the situation. That’s a great way to use automation. A facility doesn’t have to be without people to make automation an important player.

The story with automated storage has long been how it saves space. While that’s still important, space saving is being overshadowed by labor concerns as a major reason for its use.

The second leading trend is the need for ever more efficient order fulfillment, especially for piece picking. E-commerce continues to drive this trend. Everyone is faced with the need to pick smaller volume orders faster. This is a major challenge. As we found at the show, people walked in talking about labor. But when we asked about their order fulfillment concerns, that is what was really on their mind. Labor was more a symptom. Fact is our personal expectations for order delivery have now clearly bled into our work lives.

Another trend is the emergence of service as a key component of automation. Both preventive and predictive maintenance programs are very important to buyers. And they should be. Pre-set maintenance programs clearly reduce the risk that automaton will not be up and running when people need it the most. Maintenance service programs are an important part of the automation package people select today.

Q: How is Kardex Remstar reacting to these trends?

Mark Dunaway: Our automated storage solutions continue to work alongside people, improving their productivity in increasingly fast-paced order-fulfillment environments. That’s a critical answer to the labor shortage and the need to handle eaches – supplement people and help them do their better job. Piece picking is where we live and what we excel at.

We’ve also introduced Kardex Remstar Remote Support. This is a proactive maintenance program that is managed from a distance. The system uses a portal to monitor the condition of equipment and provides a remote diagnosis when something requires maintenance. It also offers extensive condition monitoring by displaying service callouts, capacity utilization and completed cycles. Suddenly, the user knows at all times the status of their order fulfillment equipment, ensuring higher uptime and minimizing risk.

To learn more about Kardex Remstar, click here.