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Archive →The AI that actually makes money in logistics is not a large model. It is a decades-old discipline
In logistics, the AI with the most solid payback is operations research: routing, scheduling, wave planning. Digital twins, LLM dispatching and humanoids are overrated for now.
The day an automated warehouse passes acceptance is the last day the factory is in charge
Choose a black-box automated warehouse and, after acceptance, every change becomes a change order. Your only leverage is before the final payment.
The money factories save through consignment ends up back in the purchase price
The founding paper on consignment shows it cuts total chain cost only if the buyer's capital costs more than the supplier's. Between OEMs and small suppliers, it is the other way round.
From SAP to AGVs, everything went live and the line got slower: none of the 8 systems owns takt time
Once every system was live, the floor asked to switch automatic order grouping back to manual. No single system is at fault; each only answers for its own documents.
Your resume says WMS for an automated warehouse? I ask about one field to know if you were on site
A manual warehouse and an automated one look identical on a resume. My dividing line is eight fields — people who can answer have been on site; people who can't have at most read the design.
A system gets bypassed three months after go-live — and it is never because staff resisted it
Say "the floor won't cooperate" and the investigation stops. The real chain has three links — bad item codes, unabsorbed variances, and the fact that you did make them slower.