Drones can even detect individual T-shirts in boxes
But logistics providers think they’ve come up with a clever and practical solution: drones. Experts from the Business Area Supply Chain are devoting careful study to an aerial solution. One of the companies that has turned to Körber for help is a French underwear manufactuer.
The customer wanted a drone that reads the RFID tags of individual pieces of clothing — even when they are still packed in boxes. For their approach to a solution, the Körber experts teamed up with the Doks start-up. Doks specializes in the digitization of stocktaking and inventory processes, master data management, and short-distance transportation in intralogistics. Among other products, the creative minds at Doks supply the drone solution Inventairy, the perfect building block for the Körber solution. “The drones available on the market up to now only scan the labels of individual pallets,” says Doks CEO Benjamin Federmann. But thanks to its modular structure, Inventairy can also read so-called RFID tags, which are identified by means of electromagnetic waves. The reason this is so useful is that it allows individual products to be tracked along the entire supply chain.
The collaboration with Doks and the customer is a good example of how Körber approaches innovations. Doks was founded in 2017 in the surroundings of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML). And Körber’s technology expert Höfle carries on a regular dialogue with the IML. “We want to keep our finger on the pulse of the times, so close dialogue with researchers is a given for us, and it’s very much in the interest of our customers,” Höfle says. “Keeping my eyes and ears open and thinking outside the box is an important part of my job and incredibly fun for me personally,” she adds.