What They Say
The TV business and the monitor businesses are both very much logistics businesses. Get your logistics right and you can run effective and profitable businesses – get them wrong and the financial problems pile up very quickly.
The Economist pointed out that one challenge for automating logistics is the robotic unloading of lorries.
As well as the Honeywell robot in the picture, the article references the Boston Dynamics Stretch handling system, with a video here.
What We Think
When I saw this article I immediately thought of the application in the TV and monitor businesses. When I first started in the monitor business, I spent time in the US studying how the firm I was working for did business there. It had what it called a ‘Ninja’ approach – everybody did everything in the lightly staffed organisation. Included were a few weeks in New Jersey that included supplying ‘Crazy Eddy’ with monitors in the run up to Christmas with a lot of loading and unloading of CRT monitors. I would have appreciated this robot!
Some years ago, I did a project with DisplaySearch for a big monitor vendor. DisplaySearch tracked costs from panel fab to FOB supply of the monitor and we tracked shipping, import and the channel models through to the buyer based on the street and channel pricing data that we collected at the time. It was fascinating to compare the efficiency of the supply chain of different vendors. Certain vendors were extremely effective at getting the latest product from ODM to user, sometimes barely touching the product. Others did a lot of handling and the supply chain really were a barrier to profitability. Understanding the supply chain and logistics really helped us understand a lot about the product management and pricing strategies of this brand. (BR)
