Photo by Dan Henry / The Chattanooga Times Free Press. Kenco Group's office building located off of Riverside Drive in Chattanooga was formerly the Pillsbury Mill. Four years after launching its innovation labs, Kenco Logistics is expanding its research and development efforts in a test warehouse at its Riverside Drive corporate headquarters complex.
The Chattanooga-based logistics company, the biggest privately held warehousing business in America, announced Tuesday that it is converting 10,000 square feet in one of its Chattanooga warehouses to serve as a test facility for the Kenco 30-employee innovations team to test out robotic systems, augmented reality equipment, automatic loading and other innovations to improve the speed and accuracy of warehouse loading, shipping and transfers.
"We are dedicated to leading the digital transformation of the supply chain," Kenco CEO Denis Reilly said in an announcement about the new facility Tuesday. "The Innovation Lab is one example of our commitment to providing well-vetted cutting-edge technologies to our customers, allowing them to achieve improved performance and enhanced supply chain value."
The new warehouse will serve as a test facility for many of the new equipment, systems and technologies Kenco and its customers are adding to improve the supply chain and movement of goods.
Kristi Montgomery, vice president of innovation at Kenco, said testing potential supply chain management solutions and technological advances outside of a live operation will enhance accuracy, sustainability and improve implementation speeds for Kenco's customers.
"It's really difficult to test some of these emerging technologies in a working warehouse environment because you could potentially impact the level of customer service," Montgomery said. "We decided to invest in creating this kind of facility to prove whether these technologies and innovations are viable for your business or not."
Kenco operates more than 90 facilities across the country which collectively have about 26 million square feet of space. Although the warehouses are yet to be fully automated, new machines are helping workers more quickly pick up and load merchandise and monitoring systems help warehouse managers better achieve quicker turnaround times to help keep drivers moving freight quicker by spending less time loading and unloading freight.
"It's very important for us to tell our customers which warehouse robots make the most sense and what new technologies and systems can aid in faster turnarounds for truck shipments and accurate accounting of loads," Montgomery said. "There's lot of different technology we will be able to test in this warehouse."
Formed in 2015, Kenco Innovation Labs and its team of innovation specialists collaborate with customers to identify, research, and prototype leading-edge ideas and processes. The innovation lab aslo partners with vendors and entrepreneurs from various industries to identify supply chain trends and think "inside the box" applying innovative solutions to complex logistics issues.
One of the products developed by Kenco's innovation lab known as "load proof" helps shippers verify the quantity and quality of products shipped to reduce customer charge-backs by 95 percent since it was implemented.
The first technologies that will be brought into the test warehouse include NextShift Robotics, a fundamentally unique autonomous mobile robotics solution; Stocked Robotics, a provider of a cloud-based AI platform and software suite that transforms existing manual fleets of material handling vehicles into autonomous swarms; LogistiVIEW, an AI and vision-driven picking software for smart glasses; and WMS software like JDA and HighJump.
"We were one of the first companies in our industry to have a fully dedicated innovation lab and now to take that to the next level where we have a space where we can test and prove out the different technologies is very unique and we hope will give us a real competitive advantage," Montgomery said.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340.