News: Press Coverage
Warehouse Optimization: Using Data And AI To Power The Brain And The Brawn Of The Warehouse
PYMNTS | July 1st, 2020
For one of his first assignments early in his consulting career, Alex Ramirez was given a task in warehouse optimization, and the client was a retailer called Walmart.
From this auspicious beginning, Ramirez — now CEO of warehouse management platform CognitOps — has been working on and innovating in an essential-but-underappreciated part of eCommerce, bringing data and artificial intelligence (AI) into the infrastructure and logistics space.
“I had a warehouse operations company before this one, and we set out to explore the pain points that we felt as software technologists in the warehouse,” Ramirez told Karen Webster. “And our previous company was another silo inside of a warehouse. So, think of warehouse management in which you have a lot of equipment and islands of automation. We were one of those islands. We were running software, but we were certainly an island.”
He continued, “When we look back at our clients, they were big companies that should have had sophisticated operations, but what we found was that they were constantly struggling, balancing all of those different islands of either software or hardware. And we felt that we were guilty in really exacerbating the pain that these individuals felt.”
CognitOps is part of Ramirez’s redemption from that experience. The best way to explain what his current company does is to look at its two products: Align and Execute.
Both are based on data and AI and make up what the company terms “warehouse management.” Align uses data from warehouse operations to sense the condition of a company’s warehouse in real time and automate labor, inventory, demand and equipment decisions. Decisions that it helps with include the amount of staff needed, the placement and amount of inventory and overseeing order replenishment.
…
