Column What worms worms #37
Boiled frog
Throw a frog into boiling water. It will jump out. Put it in cold water and heat it up slowly, and after ten minutes you will have a boiled frog. Everyone knows this. It's a similar story with innovation. Companies have become accustomed to the heat and even find it comforting at times. By the time they realize what's going on, it's too late.
The error in thinking begins in controlling: most companies see innovation as something linear. One percent market volume is reason enough to keep your hands off it, especially if it threatens your own business model and your order books are full. In real life, however, innovation is not linear, but exponential. All of a sudden, the market volume goes through the roof and if you don't have a scalable product, you end up in frog heaven, so to speak. In logistics, the risk is particularly high because technological leaps take place simultaneously in all areas - from transportation, handling and warehousing to IT and production.
It's happening in intralogistics right now. The autonomous revolution is taking place much faster there than on the road, and it is changing the intralogistics business model from the ground up. BMW recently developed an autonomous driverless transport vehicle together with the Fraunhofer IML and launched a pre-series. STR/5 is the name of the model, which is powered by decommissioned i3 batteries and will replace more than just the tugger train in the foreseeable future. Why is a car company building AGVs? Because there is nothing suitable on the market. How can that be, given that the intralogistics industry has plenty of AGVs, tugger trains, autonomous, efficient and brand new? Misconception number 2: It is not suppliers who have autonomous products or holistic solutions in their range that will do business in the future, but only those who have the will to network them with the competition. Customers like BMW dream of an intralogistics zoo in which everything that picks, drives or packs is not only autonomous, but also communicates with each other across brands according to standardized rules. Open interfaces are welcome, closed systems must stay outside, is the short and sweet message.
Open interfaces will determine the commercial success of intralogistics hardware in the future. Open interfaces? It's easy to say, but it's nothing less than the holy grail of intralogistics. On the other hand: who wants to end up in frog soup? Anita Würmser
Anita Würmser has been an institution in logistics for decades. The business and logistics journalist was editor-in-chief of "Verkehrs-Rundschau", "Logistik Heute" and "Logistik inside". Würmser is the founder and jury chairwoman of the Logistics Hall of Fame. In her exclusive columnin LT-manager, "Mutti", as she respectfully calls the industry, has not minced her wordssince issue one.
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