Kimberly-Clark: AI-enabled transportation transformation

Having covered B2B markets for 30 years, I’ve been witness to dozens of trends being overhyped to the point where the mere mention of it is reduced to background noise—devoid of meaning due to the number of times it has been spoken or written into a headline.

Our friends at Gartner have done a terrific job defining their “hype-cycle methodology” that leads to a graphical representation of the maturity and adoption of a technology. They set out to answer: “When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all?”

It’s our duty as a B2B media outlet to track the early stages of any hyped technology and its potential impact on logistics operations, but it’s not until we can see it in action that it starts to make sense. Or, as Gartner puts it: “Separate hype from the real drivers of a technology’s commercial promise.”

On this month’s cover, we hit the jackpot. Contributing editor Bridget McCrea shares the success Kimberly-Clark is having by putting a combination of machine learning and optimization algorithms to work to optimize its transportation networks—and it’s saving the company millions of dollars a year. Without giving away the store, Kimberly-Clark’s new AI-enabled platform examines demand forecasting, transportation capacity and customer service requirements to generate plans that minimize costs while still meeting all customer commitments.

“A human being can’t do that fast enough because they’d have to look at too many systems, each of which changes quickly,” Scott DeGroot, VP of global planning and logistics tells McCrea. “Using the platform, we can automatically look across all of our systems and attributes and create shipments that allow us to continually move the orders to the right place.” Find the details on
Kimberly-Clark’s transportation transformation on page 20.

And if you’re interested in learning more about how we’re progressing through the AI hype-cycle, make sure to attend Dr. Yossi Sheffi’s keynote address “Supply chains, AI, and the future of work” as well as Nathanael Powrie’s session “Generative AI and its impact on logistics and supply chain” as part of our Supply Chain Outlook: Virtual Summit on Thursday, December 7 (check your e-mail for the invitation).

And speaking of this year’s Virtual Summit, starting on page 48, editor at large Roberto Michel offers LM readers a high level-look of the findings of our 2023 Warehouse & DC Operations Survey that summarizes how e-commerce has altered warehouse/DC design and takes a deep dive into how software and automation are being applied inside the nation’s top facilities. It’s bit like a warehouse/DC hype-cycle check in.

“It was encouraging to see that the capex budgets held nearly steady, and that use-levels were up for technology like mobile robots, voice-directed solutions, and several other types of automation and software,” says Michel. “At the same time, we can’t escape the fact that respondents are under pressure to manage operations more effectively—and for that, they should assess how to better leverage the data generated by their systems.”

Indeed, the good news is that we found progress in terms of use of some types of warehouse/DC operations metrics. At the end of the day, everyone is under pressure to improve performance, and deeper use of dashboards and metrics is a good way to make that happen.