Welcome back to Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I\u2019m Marty T Hawkins and I thank you for taking the time to check back in with us today. Last week WAOC had the privilege of attending the WERC conference in Grapevine, Tx. We really enjoyed all the learning sessions and visiting with all the vendors. If you're not familiar with the Warehousing Education Research Council I\u2019d urge you to check them out. Check with your management team, odds are someone in your organization is a member and they\u2019ed be happy to share all the weekly info distributed by their authors and members. Today I thought we\u2019d talk about a few things I took away from the conference, a few thoughts of mine anyway.
\nThere was a lot of technology talk, everything from new handheld units to new innovative speech technology to advanced WMS or warehouse management systems. As you may remember I\u2019ve recently been putting together some training classes and working with young men and women that\u2019s never worked in a warehouse environment before, training them to use the electric rider jacks and to become production-based order selectors.
\nAnyway, I had a thought. You know, when we drive our vehicles somewhere, let's say to work for example, our minds really take us there. I bet you don\u2019t remember making every turn, turning on our blinkers, changing lanes, all those little things like that. That\u2019s because our minds are trained to make those kinds of motions. Yeah, we have to be focused on driving, but our minds or memory really handles the simple or repetitive tasks, don\u2019t they? That\u2019s what we train equipment operators too, our minds can do the simple task or thoughts. We\u2019re consciously are thinking of that next slot, checking out our surrounds, watching for others etc and our minds subconsciously will see that our speeds and maneuvering through the warehouse is handled safely. Of course, we\u2019re staying focused and safe though. As professionals, I\u2019ve learned our minds are one of the greatest systems within our industry. Anyway, technology made me think of that. Wow, I wondered off topic there but really, to some degree I feel we train our minds and muscles to let us learn to be more productive and a much safer employee.
\nAnyway, I wanted to talk about some of the technologies that were discussed, and I bet some of us have a few opinions on what\u2019s out there now, how its improving and what\u2019ll be available to us in a few years!
\nBack in the mid 1990\u2019s I had the fortune of working with one of the first order selection systems brought to market. Everything was wired. We had a wrist mount unit that had a small cable running to our finger scanning unit. We wore a battery pack and a small label printer around our waist, a cable connected the two. There were small wire clips that held the wiring to our freezer suits so everything didn\u2019t get all tangled up. Cumbersome but effective. Today everything is Bluetooth or NFC with no communication delays and no wiring of any kind. These units are much more productive than the ones I learned with.
\nSpeech recognition came out a few years later and again, and I\u2019ll be nice here and say it was ok. No but really, you had to speak very slowly, it\u2019s learning capabilities was slow. We all speak the language a little differently, especially here in Texas. We had to provide so much input, verifying our locations, repeat our check queue\u2019s over and over, it was just slow. I\u2019ve never been a fan of speech selection but after seeing how far the technologies came over the years, I\u2019ve got to say I\u2019m sold on it now. I visited with several men and women using todays units and talked about all the advantages and efficiencies experienced by the employees and employers today, I\u2019m on the bandwagon again!
\nLucas Systems gave a great presentation on the new speech technologies and systems, from both an employee and management prospective, I feel it's worth a look.