How to Identify and Manage Warehouse Hazards with Justin Emmons of OneTrack

Transcript

Evan: This is Evan from OneTrack, and you are listening to another episode of Warehouse Visionaries, where I sit down with leaders shaping the future of warehousing logistics to discuss how they're doing it, so the rest of us can too. Today, I'm talking to Justin Emmons. He is the lead implementation engineer with OneTrack. He's working with customers every single day to help improve their warehouse operations. Justin has a wealth of knowledge and experience, working on the floor of a warehouse, all the way up to actually managing multiple sites. So, Justin, really excited to talk to you today and dig in.

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Justin: Super excited to be here, Evan.

Evan: Well, first things first, how about you tell everyone a little bit about who you are, your background, and what you're doing at OneTrack these days?

Justin: My name is Justin Emmons. I'm the lead implementation engineer with OneTrack. My warehousing experience actually started about 15 years ago, where I was brought in as a temp within a warehouse, breaking down metal racking within a tire warehouse. Shortly after that project, I was invited to become a forklift operator with that same company. At that time, I was picking tires for about six, seven months. Brought in as an inventory specialist at that point. Worked my way through being an inventory lead, moved back into operations as an operations lead supervisor. Later in my career, I started getting into higher-level management teams and working with multiple facilities. At one point, I had 8 facilities underneath myself from an analyst perspective. Multiple analysts across the network, things like that. And our main focus was inventory control, continuous improvement, those types of projects that are looking at improving efficiencies within the warehouses themselves.

Evan: One of the cool things is you have all that experience, but then also you're talking to warehousing, logistics people every single day in your role with OneTrack. What are some of those main challenges that you're hearing about that people are facing in the industry?

Justin: I think consistently what we see across our customers is a big focus around productivity and efficiency. Doesn't matter whether you're a 3PL or a CPG customer. Producing the product yourself or you're paying somebody else to store the product. Companies are looking at how do I become more efficient? How do I become more productive? How do I stay safe while doing all of that? That being the key there. I don't want to miss out on that piece there. Becoming more efficient and becoming more productive while staying safe is a big piece that I think every customer touches on. That's one of our main focuses with everybody. We start out from a safety perspective then move into a productivity phase of the project.

I would say some initial reactions across the board are: we have some pretty good safety processes built, and our employees are safe. We install OneTrack, and it's like, whoa, there's how many events of that type within the first week? And so that's really cool to see that everybody is struggling with the same problems and then OneTrack being that solution that can help solve those problems for everybody. No matter what your customer type, no matter what your building size, safety has no bounds; that is a focus for everybody. And so regardless of what your shift structure looks like, how many employees you have—regardless of all of those factors, at the end of the day, you want your employees to come into the door safe and leave safe. At the end of the day, it's a business, right? You're looking to be profitable. And with that, you want to keep in mind your efficiencies and your productivity goals in order to improve and move forward to that next level.

Evan: And I think we're in an interesting spot because you work with both 3PLs on one side of the equation, then shippers, brands, manufacturers on the other side of that equation. Do you think the priorities or those challenges, those focuses are different between the two groups? Or what are you seeing as you're talking to each group day to day?

Justin: Yeah, so there's going to be a little bit of differences. From the manufacturer CPG side of things where they may have multiple 3PLs. Obviously, their focus is being efficient, working with those companies, whether it's one single company that's handling their entire network or multiple companies that are handling the entire network. The focus there is really making sure that everybody's being consistent in process, making sure that everybody's being efficient, and things like that where they have their own KPIs that they're measuring the companies on.

From a 3PL perspective, we're working across the board across multiple buildings to make sure that the buildings are meeting those same criteria, those KPIs, those metrics that they're looking at from a company standard as a 3PL. 3PLs always want to make sure that they give their best foot forward for their customers. Whereas, the CPG manufacturer side, they are the customer, right? They want to keep their best foot forward for their consumers. And so, I think in a lot of ways they do co-mingle a lot of the time, but there are certain nuances where the CPG manufacturer side is looking at different metrics and want to see things more at a high-level network view versus the 3PL companies wanting to look more specifically and drill down into the individual buildings that may be less efficient, less productive, less safe, so that way they can put their focus there and make sure that they're operating safely.

Evan: Got it. I mean, I think you and really the rest of your team all have a lot of that deep warehouse experience. There's not a single person in the customer operations team that doesn't come from the warehouse world, which I think is really unique. But how do you apply that to today? I think you focus a lot on solving challenges with customers and like identifying problems and figuring out solutions to solve those problems. So how do you rewind the clock back to the days when you were actually in the warehouse? How do you kind of take that lens and apply it to your work with customers?

Justin: So the good thing about warehousing and logistics is that the mode of transportation may change, the equipment might update and become better, easier, safer. But at the end of the day, processes are product in, product out. Between, you do a little bit of picking, you do some re-plans, you do some put away. But at the end of the day, the processes are essentially the same as they were a hundred years ago. Process-wise, nothing changes. Now your system may be a little bit different in the way that you complete that process, maybe a little bit different. Some companies might have a WMS where you click one button and it completes the function. That's the difference there from a process perspective, but overall, high level, it's the same problems that I was facing in the warehouse. It's the same problems that our customers are facing today.

One thing that I really enjoy about this job and being able to take my experience is working directly with those customers. And so when we're having a conversation about having a problem with XYZ, whatever it may be, let's call it product damage. Great. Well, let's dive into that. Me being in inventory and using my inventory experience, I can easily relate to, Hey, I had a pallet fall. I don't know who dropped that pallet. I don't know how it dropped, when it happened, or what that looks like. Okay, great. Let's use the OneTrack system to identify who was in that area. Were there any type of events that were detected during that time, raw events, maybe if the AI is filtering it out, you know, we can take a look at raw events during a specific time across all lifts and then diving down into, Oh, it looks like the tip of the forks barely hit this pallet, which is what caused it to fall.

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Or whatever the case may be, using that experience that I've had to be able to say, it looks like, and it appears that this is what happened. I'm able to correlate that from past experience to today. I think that's one of the most cool things about my position today and working with OneTrack and working with all the different customers is I'm able to pull from that previous experience.

We had an example where we were working with a customer and identifying what happened during an event. And actually, our internal team was reviewing it. And so they had pinged me and said, "Hey, do you have quick five minutes to discuss this event?"

And so, when we watched it, my initial reaction was, "Oh, well, that’s why this happened—it’s because when they shifted the load over, the pallet hit the beam of the upright of the racking." And it was something that they didn’t notice at first. And it's just through that experience, I was able to point it out to them and say, "This is what happened more than likely." This is why we detected this type of event, because XYZ happened. So, that’s really cool and interesting for me—being able to use that knowledge, use that experience, and then bring it and partner with our customers to say, "Hey, what problems are you having? Let’s work together on a solution." I may not have the answer. It may be a problem that I’ve never seen before in my life. But the fact that I have that knowledge to bring and to bring to the OneTrack side and say, "Look, this is an issue, and I can see why we need to solve for X."

Evan: Yeah, I think it’s that foundational knowledge, right? Like you mentioned, the day in, day out of a warehouse kind of stays the same—it’s product in, product out. There’s a lot of nuance that happens in between the racks and in between those hours. That’s kind of where you need someone that has that foundational experience, as opposed to someone who’s not really used to seeing how a warehouse operates. It’s fast-paced, there’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s machinery and loud noises and people flying in every which way. You need to have that knowledge and muscle memory almost just to be able to say, "Yeah, I think this is happening because of these other things that happened."

Justin: You bring up a good point. There really is like an investigative piece to it, right? When you're trying to figure out, "Where did this pallet come from that's now sitting on my dock that I had no idea of 24 hours before?" And you've got to take that investigative approach of just taking a step backward and looking at, "Okay, who was in that area? When was the last time this product was touched? Where was this pallet originally from versus where it was found? Where is it showing systematically now?"

And taking that investigative approach to say, "What is happening with this pallet?" I think that’s one thing that kind of interests me from an inventory perspective, as well as just being able to dive in and figure those problems out. There are a lot of times where pallets are placed in the wrong aisle simply because someone thought it was aisle 14, but it was actually aisle 41. There’s a lot of those types of things that happen. That’s the fun piece—taking that experience and translating it over.

Evan: So it feels like AI has taken not just the industry, but the world by storm. I don’t think you could throw a rock without hitting something that’s AI-powered. It’s in everything from news headlines to marketing campaigns and everything in between. But if you really cut through all that noise, what are your thoughts on AI in logistics and warehousing?

Justin: Before joining OneTrack, I used to have a pretty good buddy of mine that we worked with together, and we’d always be thinking through different solutions and things. You know, it’d be nice if we had XYZ and this would track that. And so, even taking the AI perspective out of it—and a little bit of what we talked about before and what I mentioned was—overall, the processes have stayed the same.

I think AI is helping to shake that up a little bit in the fact that there are a lot of different tools now that allow you to, whether it’s looking at data and analyzing data more effectively, or tools such as ours where we're detecting events that are pertinent for the team to review and look at. Down to even automated AGVs, automated forklifts within the warehousing industry. You see that a lot more often now than when I was first starting. Everything in between.

I mean, all of those solutions are definitely solutions to the problem and shaking up the warehousing industry. I think overall, at any point, every industry needs to be shaken up with some type of innovation. And I feel like AI is that next piece of innovation. That's our next kind of industrial revolution. How do we bring technology even further? We had the industrial revolution with machinery and things like that and bringing electricity to the manufacturing line.

And we’re in that time now where we’re setting the stage for the next evolution of an industry—not only warehousing, but everywhere. I mean, there isn’t an industry that is not impacted by AI, computer vision, machine learning in some way or another. And if they haven’t up until this point, I would imagine that it’s coming soon.

Evan: Yeah, I don’t think you're far off there. But I think it brings up an interesting point where AI probably means a lot of things to a lot of people. I think it’s like this magical black box that no one’s really sure what’s inside of it. So, break it down for me in simple terms. How does AI—we’ll take OneTrack as the example—how does it actually work in very simple terms?

Justin: Essentially, what happens is that we have our sensors detecting events, and we have computer vision that is analyzing the footage of the events themselves. The system is essentially putting a fingerprint to each event detected, taking a combination of what is happening within the computer vision, what is happening from a G-force perspective, what is happening from every little body motion of the operator, the environment that the forklift is in, whether it's outside, inside—rough floors, smooth floors, so be it. It’s taking all of those data points and creating a fingerprint. From there, when we detect an event, we’re basically comparing that fingerprint against each other and saying, "Okay, is this similar to another event? If so, send that event out. If not, then it holds it."

Now, we still capture that event, right? It’s still held within our raw events, but it doesn’t get sent necessarily. So every once in a while, AI is not perfect, certainly, and we’re still working to improve. And I wouldn’t say that it’s 100% accurate. We’re probably in the 90th percentile. So, it does make mistakes from time to time. So it’s important to capture those raw events and still store them. All of our customers have the ability to still review and search for those filtered events if they wanted to. But long story short, that’s essentially how it works—we’re fingerprinting each of these events that are captured. From there, the AI is determining, "Okay, have I seen a similar match and have I sent those out? If so, send this one."

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Evan: You bring up being in the 90th percentile. I think even being in the 90th percentile brings so much more context to what’s going on. I remember back in my warehouse manufacturing days, the people who would just hang out in racks and watch movies on their phone, find little nooks and crannies to go hide out in, or things would be off in the corner tagged out and someone would say, “Why is that forklift sitting back there?” No one knew. If you could get 90% more of those activities and actually see them, then you could do so many more things from an operational leadership standpoint. Because you can’t solve problems you can’t see. I think that’s the whole premise of AI and computer vision and the premise of what OneTrack is built on, right? We want to bring visibility so you can solve more of those problems. And I think that’s really fascinating.

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Justin: Yeah. And to piggyback off of that, a lot of times customers say, when we first go live, they’re like, “Wow, operators are on their phones how many times?” And we’ve done a short, quick analysis. Essentially, what we found is, for every phone use the sensor detects, it’s about four minutes of productivity time lost for that one event. So, let’s say within an hour an operator is looking at their phone five times. You’ve now lost 20 minutes’ worth of productivity time—gone, just by that one operator looking at their phone.

And so, I think that the interesting piece there, to piggyback on what you were saying, is you have a lot of these events that are happening that you don’t have visibility to without OneTrack or without these tools. Even if, outside of OneTrack, you have surveillance cameras. When those first came out, everybody installs surveillance cameras in the building. And it was like, "Oh, now we can pull up any time code of any point in time and see this footage." OneTrack is kind of that shaker, where you install these sensors on your forklifts, and now all of a sudden it’s like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that somebody hit that rack,” or “I knew somebody hit it, but I didn’t know who. Now I see who.” And so, being able to have that visibility into safety, productivity, and continuous improvement is a game changer from a warehousing side.

Evan: It’s kind of like an iceberg, right? You have this 500,000 square foot warehouse, that’s this massive iceberg. But when your supervisors are on the roam around the floor, when you’re out—managers out walking around—what they’re seeing is the very tip of that iceberg. There’s all these things happening beneath the surface. That’s where the problems show up. That’s where your SOPs aren’t being followed. That’s where someone’s denting a rack and not saying anything about it, and then two weeks later the whole rack comes down, and it’s a massive incident. There are all kinds of horror stories that I think we all can relate to if you’re in the warehouse world. It’s what’s below the surface of that iceberg—that’s what really moves the needle for an operation. But you have to be able to see that to move that needle.

Justin: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think that’s one thing that our team does very, very well—trying to bring that iceberg to the top of the water, where you have more of the iceberg up above the water versus underneath, where you can’t see it. Showing those types of events, bringing that awareness to the team, showing there is an issue on this shift or with this specific operator, and looking back at the history of that operator. Seeing events that are happening, and they’re only within the four weeks of being hired—that’s a good callout that gives a lot of good context to the management team in order to coach that operator and bring them up.

I like to say that I’ve always had this perspective or this mindset, when working with operators and working with the team, that we always try to coach them up. Coach up your operators. Give them the pieces of information that they’re missing. At the end of the day, in their mind, if they’re following a process incorrectly, they may think that they’re doing it correctly. And so, until you get with them and say, “No, that’s not the right way. You should be scanning before picking, or you should be doing this before that,” that’s the only way that they’re going to know. Because at the end of the day, they think they’re doing everything correctly that they should be. You do have your bad actors who are purposely doing things out there, but to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, I always try to coach first. And then from there, we can take it a step further if needed. But ultimately, once you have that initial conversation and kind of set the record, maybe there’s a reminder or two that comes afterward. But ultimately, my goal is to keep that operator there, make sure that they’re aware of what the process is, and operate safely, productively, and efficiently.

Evan: I think that’s a really good perspective and not an uncommon thing I’ve heard, where even just between different sites there could be different processes on the right way to do things. And an operator could be in Building A one day and Building B the next week, and they have two very different processes, whether it’s “You have a load on—you can’t go forward, you have to reverse.” So you can actually see, like, some warehouses don’t have that. I think it’s those little nuanced behaviors that can really make a difference in a building. What are some of those hidden hazards or what we call leading indicators of safety that, whether you have OneTrack or not, sites should be looking for and correcting when it comes to behavior or maybe process impediments or whatever that might look like?

Justin: That’s a great question. I think there are actually a few of them that we see across the board with our customers. For example, operators using their cell phones. So, when a supervisor is walking the floor, a lot of times operators are going to try to hide that, and you may not be able to capture those types of incidents. But a lot of times, supervisors have a working relationship with their operators, and yes, they need to hold them accountable. And a lot of times they’ll be like, “Hey, I saw that. Put it away. Don’t do it again,” and kind of have that verbal coaching in the moment. But what they’re not aware of is that another supervisor has already talked to them five times about doing that same thing and already given them that same approach of “Hey, just put it away.”

So, when operators learn that, “Hey, I’m not going to be disciplined, or I’m not going to be held to the standard of the company policy, I can kind of get away with things,” it can become a bigger issue. So just from that perspective, making sure that supervisors are equipped with the right playbooks, the right conversation topics, and things they can do to work with the employee, making sure that they’re in tune with what HR policies are, what the expectation is, and holding operators to those policies.

At the end of the day, you have a building to operate. You want to make sure that everybody’s operating safely. And one of the biggest leading indicators that we’ve seen is a lot of cell phone events means there are safety events that are occurring as well. What you don’t want to have happen is somebody using their cell phone while driving the equipment. Absolutely not. It’s bad enough that they’re looking at it when they’re parked—that’s a productivity and efficiency issue. But if an operator is driving their forklift with a cell phone, that’s distracted driving that can easily hurt somebody very badly.

To get off that topic a little bit, but more on the productivity side—just being aware of downtime and idle time. Are you walking past the forklift area all the time and seeing parked lifts? One of the ultimate things that I had a manager once tell me is, the ultimate goal within warehousing is to get the product moving. When the forklifts are not moving, or if they’re moving without pallets on them, then you’re essentially losing money every second that’s happening. So just being cognizant and aware, as you’re walking the warehouse floor, as you’re looking at your building, do you see lifts that are just sitting parked with no product on them? Do you see lifts moving around the building with no product on them?

And what can you do to improve those efficiencies and that productivity gain to where that product is constantly moving? Another big area from a productivity side would be your breaks and lunches. I challenge everybody that doesn’t have OneTrack to just go stand outside during break and lunchtime, see how long it’s taking operators to get back moving. When they park their lifts, are they parking their lifts and then talking with their buddy and then walking to the break room? When they come back from breaks, are they coming back from their break, putting their stuff on their equipment, and then running to the restroom, and then doing this, or then getting that, and then finally the equipment moves? There is a lot of downtime around breaks and lunches specifically.

And that’s one of the really cool things about OneTrack. By using QR sign-on and the activity codes, you’re able to track how much downtime is occurring. We call it opportunity time around breaks and lunch. And so you can see when an operator has five minutes of idle time before switching into the break activity code. And when they come back from break, you can see that the lift didn’t move or was sitting idle for another 10 minutes after that.

So, that’s a big piece from a productivity side—leading indicators. What are you seeing in your building? Do you see operators moving without pallets? Do you see them chit-chatting? And so those are just some of the things we see across the board from a leading indicator perspective. A lot of times they could be correlated with one another.

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Evan: Yeah, and then back to that cell phone usage piece, some other nuanced behaviors that I’ve seen are someone wearing their hood while operating the forklift and they can’t see their peripheral vision, or not looking in the direction of travel, taking both hands off the controls, hiding AirPods underneath your beanie. There are just so many of these behaviors that go unnoticed in a lot of warehouses. I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I think that’s one of the keys—find a way to get that data and that visibility so that you can solve those problems.

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Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I think headphones being in the ears is definitely a big one. Making sure that you can hear the horns when driving—if you come into a cross-section or intersection, something like that—you want to make sure that you can hear the horns beeping throughout the warehouse. In my previous life, we had an operator get pretty seriously injured by another operator having their headphones in. They didn’t hear him coming around the corner. They essentially smacked into each other. Unfortunately, the one operator that was injured also had their foot outside of the compartment, which was another safety issue. But the combination of one operator not being able to hear and the other operator’s foot hanging outside of the compartment—those two forklifts hitting each other altered that person’s life for the rest of their life.

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That’s the piece that interested me in OneTrack and in coming to the OneTrack team—we are making a difference. We are showing safety events to the management team and the leadership team of events that need to be resolved and addressed with their employees. At the end of the day, we always want to make sure that everybody’s operating safely. And we can dive into productivity, but we never want to lose focus on safety, making sure that people are operating in the most productive, but also the safest way possible.

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Evan: Speaking of the productivity, quality, and safety side of things—we talk about OneTrack being that warehouse operating system. That one-stop shop, that single-source platform to manage everything across safety, productivity, and quality in operations. Not just at one site or one warehouse, but across a network of warehouses or even a network of 3PLs. What role do you think that type of technology plays in logistics and warehousing? That idea of having one place to go to run your operations versus a dozen different spreadsheets and five different tools and this kind of scattershot approach?

Justin: What we're starting to move towards and focus on is becoming a warehouse operating system. Not just an intelligence platform, but an entire operating system—here’s where you can go to get all of your pieces of information. Let’s pull as much information into OneTrack as possible, whether it be your current safety data that you're housing in a different area, your WMS and your transactions and coaching operators, bringing that into OneTrack. Whether it be your tasks that you expect your supervisors to complete, bringing that into OneTrack.

I think the ultimate goal there is that you have one place to go to. Your supervisors have one place to go to, your middle management, your leadership teams have one place to go to get that information, rather than trying to pull these sources from different areas. Again, in my previous life, I was in the analytics side and looking at continuous improvement and what we can do. And it’s a pain trying to pull data points from all these different sources and places to get it into one area so that I can analyze and see what is the average time that trucks are going out? What’s the average wait time? What can we do there?

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OneTrack can provide that for you, bringing the data into one area and seeing how the information correlates. So, you may have a shift that’s underperforming a little bit—well, is that supervisor completing their daily tasks that they should be? Are they working with and doing their safety observations? Are they doing those tasks that ultimately you see success on other shifts? And a lot of times the answer is no, and it just gets lost due to visibility. A lot of times, off-shifts don’t have the all-eyes-on-deck that you would maybe on a day shift because everybody’s working during normal business hours and you have someone working an off-shift.

Bringing all of that information into one place allows you to look at your shifts and say, "Okay, I’m struggling here. I’m struggling there. I need to work with this. They’re doing this good." Getting all those data points into one area is a massive unlock from a management perspective and making sure that the buildings are operating as efficiently as possible, not only from an operator productivity standpoint but also with your management team.

That’s one thing that we hear consistently across the board—"My supervisors have a lot of tasks to do." And one of the initial concerns is that when OneTrack comes in, we start detecting all these safety events that you weren’t being notified of before. You now see that with OneTrack, and I think part of the thing is making sure that those events are getting resolved in time. And so there’s the amount of tasks, the number of things that your supervisors have to do—whether it be safety observations, daily walks, those types of things.

Seeing all that in one place, utilizing the tools that OneTrack has built in order to monitor tasks, look at live reporting that refreshes every two minutes—things like that—that just ultimately helps the building become stronger. And our goal is never to shine a negative light. It’s always to shine a light on where your improvements could be, not from a negativity standpoint. Again, taking that mindset from a coaching perspective, the same way that you would with your operators. The mindset is, "Let’s show the teams where they’re lacking so that they can improve." At the end of the day, if you don’t know where you’re lacking, how are you ever going to improve that process?

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We’ve done some things with some of the tools we have, where you have your OneCheck system where you can capture your preflights. We’re rolling out a supervisor LSW task list where you can track the tasks within supervisors and what they’re performing and doing. All of these tools give the management team the ultimate playbook on becoming as efficient, becoming as productive, and becoming as safe as possible. And showing these events and triggering events to them so that they can see the events that are necessary for them to see.

Evan: The safest, fastest warehouses on the planet. That’s definitely our goal. I really appreciate you joining me. I could talk with you for hours about this, but I gotta let you get back to your day job. I really appreciate you.

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Justin: No, I appreciate it, Evan. Thanks for having me.

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Evan: And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in to another episode of Warehouse Visionaries. Remember to check us out at OneTrack.AI/warehouse-visionaries, or you can follow us on YouTube or LinkedIn to never miss an episode. And of course, don’t forget to go give Justin a follow as well. See you guys next time.