When it comes to digitisation and AI, start-ups are often at the forefront of the most disruptive change. Here, we examine how one company known to POWTECH for its expertise in packaging, loading and palletising is fully embracing them
THERE’S A VERY OLD JOKE IN MANY HOUSEHOLDS THAT, WHEN IT COMES TO ANYTHING INVOLVING THE LATEST technology, it’s best left to the younger members. Tales of children programming the video and teenagers setting up email accounts for their parents go back to the old millennium. It is fitting then that areas such as AI, IoT and digitisation are a prime target for the start-up market - not to mention logistics where a global market valued at €6,497 billion in 2017 is widely being projected to soar to €11,033 billion by 2027.
New technologies, new players and new thinking have made the best examples of these emerging companies an attractive proposition for some of the world’s leading and best-established companies in terms of future planning. One such is BEUMER Group which is relying on two spin- offs which - with the support of start-ups – have picked up the baton when it comes to digital projects, something Dr. Johannes Stemmer summarised when he said: “It would be naive to think that we could make this digital transformation happen at the push of a button.” This is a company which has had traditional mechanical engineering as its core business for eight decades and one which knows that the route to such serious change lies in reworking the entire culture. In his role as Director of Digital Transformation, Dr. Stemmer and his team organised workshops and initiated what the company described as “intensive discussions” with colleagues, asking the
question: “What does digital transformation mean for us and what will change?” The company is currently one of the world’s leading system providers in intralogistics, with staff numbering around 4,500. Dr. Stemmer summarised it thus: “Worldwide, we take care of everything which has to be transported from A to B. “Our customers are, for example, large parcel service
providers whose parcel centres we equip with sortation and distribution systems. If a customer orders a package at an online retailer or sends this package back, this is often done through our systems.”
INTEGRATING AN INNOVATION STRATEGY This system concept can also be applied to suitcases at airports - everything the passenger cannot see: from checking in at the terminal, to the sorting and distribution technology for baggage items. But away from that, the Group is also a full-range supplier of packaging lines and conveying and loading systems for bulk goods from a wide range of industries and more and more developments are being driven by the current challenges of digitisation. “We must constantly improve our products to increase
our competitiveness so that our customers can reduce their costs and optimise their processes,” explained the Group’s Chairman and CEO Dr. Christoph Beumer. For this reason, the system supplier has for years integrated innovation management into its strategy and applied for nearly 100
NEW TECH NEW IMPETUS
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