Chris Barnes (00:06):
Hey, it’s Chris, the supply chain doctor, and they picked coach providing you insights and tools to better understand and apply the apex body of knowledge to everyday supply chains. In this interview, we spoke with John Hill industry veteran in the data collection and warehouse management systems space to get a better understanding of the history of this important supply chain industry. It all sounds pretty boring. So let’s see if John can prove me wrong, John, thanks for speaking with me today, about your career in supply chain management and specifically the field of technology. When I first met you many years ago, you were doing the WMS slash data collection road shows for what I think was, was MHI. It may have been different back then. I was thoroughly impressed with your knowledge and your presentation style and, and I use many of your ideas and probably even some of your content over the years to help educate and sell people on, on warehouse management systems.
Chris Barnes (01:01):
So, John, what I want you to do is just kind of take me back to kind of where, where you got started, how you got started in the field and which I think is now you call it WMS, but back then it wasn’t, I think it’s over 40 years ago, if I’m correct. Is that right? Well, close to 50. Okay. And thank you for having me, Chris. It’s just a pleasure to have you, as I said, I, I’m a big fan of understanding. I’ve been very fortunate in the WMS field and in my career and I just like to learn the history of it. That’s what we’re doing here. So you started, well, I think you went to university, uh, what was your degree at university? Yeah, industrial psychology. Industrial psychology. Interesting. I have to be careful about the questions. I have to be careful about the questions that I asked.
John Hill (01:45):
Well, I was told at the time that I would never get out of the university unless I majored in engineering being a brash young 18 year old, I said, I can take any course and do all right. And so I wound up doing industrial psychology and it’s lived with me my entire career. And where’d you go to university Princeton. So that is an interesting place, obviously well known, but I just, last month I did an interview with a gentleman named Ken Ackerman. Oh, I know Ken very well. Yeah. He’s one of the founders of work and I didn’t realize he also went to Princeton. So there must be something in the water. I don’t know. It had to be, although he’s much older than I am. And while I joked, I joked with him that maybe him, I didn’t realize you, but now it’s two people. You and he are competing with Jeff Bezos for probably the most popular logistics alumni from Princeton, I would guess. You’re right. But I won’t speak for Ken, but I certainly am trailing Jeff. Sure. Now why you end up going to Princeton?
John Hill (03:00):
It had to do with back in those days, if you were doing well in secondary school, it wasn’t too hard to get into a university. And I was playing in a school boy hockey tournament on the Princeton campus, whenever that was 1954 during the Christmas holidays. And Princeton has one of the most delicious landscapes of any school I had even been thinking of. And once I was there, number one, we won the hockey tournament. And number two, I was overcome by a real strong interest in attending the university. And so I called my advisor at my high school and I said, could we switch this from Yale to Princeton? And he said, yeah. And that’s how I wound up there.
Chris Barnes (03:56):
I know they take relatively smart people. So it gives you some credibility there. And now it’s, they’re good universities either one. Yeah. You bet. So how did you get involved in? Well, I called it in my introduction. I call it a supply chain management. My understanding is probably wasn’t called supply chain management 40 or 50 years ago. So how did you get involved in physical distribution, logistics or supply chain management?
John Hill (04:20):
Well, I came by way of, uh, the automatic identification route. And I had a hand in, in putting together as a role player, a company called computer identical, which plan there that use barcoding and laser scanners back in the late sixties. And, uh, it became very quickly obvious to us that in effect, a barcode scanner is little more than a novelty unless it’s got some brains behind it. And that led us into doing systems with that technology, albeit some of them primitive and that led. And we’ll talk a little bit about the path I followed, but it led me into the world of material handling and warehousing and distribution and logistics and that’s many years ago and now, but I, I never for a minute, not enjoyed the dynamics of the industry and been very much engaged along the way.
Chris Barnes (05:33):
Well, I just listened to the webinar that you were actually on. And I think you said the, the supply chain execution systems concept’s been around since 1975.
John Hill (05:45):
We didn’t even call them supply chain. Then we called them the warehouse management system.
Chris Barnes (05:52):
Okay. Even back then. Okay.
John Hill (05:54):
And way, way ahead of supply chain execution systems. And there’s a side note here, warehouse management systems back in Oh, was not that long ago. At least for me, it’s 30 years ago, we formed a group called the warehouse management systems trade association under the umbrella of MHI the material handling industry. And there were 29 companies back then who were offering WMS to the market place. And a few of the people in the group said, we’ve got a warehouse management, isn’t terribly sexy. We’ve we’ve got to put a new name on it. And that’s when the term or phrase supply chain execution systems was born right around 1995.
Chris Barnes (06:53):
It’s interesting companies to this day are still trying to come up with a new name, logistics execution, whereas controls, you know what everybody’s trying to figure out what it is. I first learned about WMS in probably 19 around that time I’m out of Atlanta. So obviously the big company here was Manhattan associates, and I always thought they were one of the originals, uh, WMS companies.
John Hill (07:19):
Well, they, they actually came a bit late to the party. If you look at the chronology, um, by late, I mean, uh, late 1980s, early 1990s, but they came in under the leadership of a fellow by the name of Alan Dabiri, who was the CEO and founder of Manhattan. And they came in with a bang very, very strong,
Chris Barnes (07:52):
Did a lot of things. Well, they kind of, they kind of helped create the industry, I think, but before that, even you had done some things in that space, is that correct?
John Hill (08:01):
Oh, absolutely. I, I joined, well, my first introduction to warehouse management was at a material handling industry trade show at McCormick place in 1974, when the founder of the world’s first WMS company guy by the name of Vince occupancy, met me at his booth and proceeded to try to sell me into leaving my company at the time and training his further down the line during our discussion today, 10 years later in 1985, I was recruited by the board of logistic con to take over and be calm the CEO of the, so what comes around, goes around.
Chris Barnes (08:59):
So you had obviously had a lot of experience in back then. It was, everything was focused on
John Hill (09:06):
Probably that was a big part of it. Well, and certainly was. And, but, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. I have a quasi mantra, which is basically that the best decision making is executed on the basis of events as, or before, not after they occur responsive systems provide discipline and control based not only upon plans and performance goals, but also on the dynamics of actual operations. I wrote that for one of the trade magazines in 1976. So if you, if you take a look at that and then look at the landscape today of systems and tools that are available to speed the flow of products from source to consumption, uh, it still applies the difference today though is today we really have the tools to make it happen far beyond we ever envisaged 20, 30 years ago.
Chris Barnes (10:14):
So the logistic con that was a, that was a WMS company,
John Hill (10:19):
The first one,
Chris Barnes (10:21):
The first one, and who was involved with that with you? And he was, was a Dave Scott, was he,
John Hill (10:30):
You know, David’s day anniversary of David’s death was a couple of days ago. I miss him a lot. I think about him virtually every other day. And I talked with his widow on Monday. And so does she, so we reminisced about the good old days. David was a trailblazer, a barn burner, a brilliant, brilliant engineer and systems designer who I credit with much of the progress that has been made on the system side, in the world of warehouse management. Well, thanks for giving me a chance to mention his name.
Chris Barnes (11:14):
So he was, uh, he was that logistic come with you.
John Hill (11:18):
Yeah. And he was, uh, my alter ego. I was mr. Outside. He was mr. Insight. He made things happen. So you promised it and he delivered it. Exactly. And I didn’t over promise. Sure. And he rarely under delivered. Uh, but he paved the way for what today is a pretty significant component of the overall mix of technology and systems for logistics. I started my career 3m after of stint in the military, and I took various tests. And because I had a degree in psychology, not engineering, and they were trying to figure out what to do with me. And they put me together with a professor from the university of Minnesota who was another trailblazer at the time. And he taught me quite a bit over the seven years I spent with 3m, most of it overseas, but he introduced me to what I would call the first, the very first instance of using intelligent controls to improve performance and material handling across the board and the variety of different applications.
John Hill (12:47):
And some of your listeners, our listeners might be interested in this first application, 3m manufactured a product, uh, at the time it was called scotch light, which you see on virtually you see it and its successors, um, virtually every traffic sign highway sign across the country. In most countries in the world, it is consists of retro reflective material by retro reflective. I mean it returns light the source and at 3:00 AM, uh, my mentor was tasked with figuring out a way to identify packages and cartons moving in warehouses and distribution centers to eliminate the need for some person, sitting at a keyboard to read a label on the garden or the package and key enter the sortation destination. Other words of shipping dock, for example. And he came up with this concept using retro reflective tape about an inch long piece of it, which could be applied to given locations on the vertical spine or axis pick cart, each location on the carton spine represented a specific sortation destination.
John Hill (14:21):
For example, a shipping in a warehouse once picked and tape, the curtains were placed on a takeaway can there that led or fed the shipping docs. And then we installed photo cells at a height equivalent to that, of the tape on the spine of the garden in advance of multiple sortation spurs at a height, unique to each spur when photocell detected the reflective tape, it fired a cell annoy, which then triggered curtain sortation off the conveyor to that destination. Our first customer was the Kroger company. And over the next several years, hundreds of companies around the world use the same approach to eliminate keyboards, reduce the number of key stroke errors and improve throughput throughout North America. Now that’s a pretty simplistic primitive use of technology, but back then, and this is mid sixties, it did revolutionize a major component of warehouse that being sortation.
Chris Barnes (15:36):
Yeah, I was gonna say that sounds a lot like shipping sorters and getting things efficiently moved out. That was 1960s. I recently listened to a, another podcast. One of my colleagues, I guess this week is the, uh, the birthday of the, or the celebration of the invention of the UPC code, a barcode. And it’s interesting. I think they’ve mentioned
John Hill (15:56):
Kroger was pretty involved in logistics and supply chain back then they had an industrial engineering department back then and I suspect they still do that was all not on the bleeding edge, but the leading edge of technology application and the whole focus, at least at the time was to improve throughput without undermining accuracy and overall performance in warehouse or distribution center. I moved from 3m because I was intrigued by this whole business. Being able to use some type of scanning device in an industrial application or industrial environment and went to a company called computer identity, or the technical team invented the world’s first laser based moving beam scanner. And they installed it at the Buick division of general motors to read. And for the techies among you close your ears a four bit I E data points, black and white label and feed the data contained in those four bits to a deck, PDP, a computer with a whopping eight K of memory.
John Hill (17:16):
And we finally sold actually, we didn’t sell. We leased because it was new technology and Buick wanted a way out if it didn’t work, leased it to Buick, the overall price, one laser scanner, one PDP, a computer, a teletype for printing reports and a mag tape drive that weighed enough. You needed two people to move it around the store, perhaps a megabyte of data. Now that eight K of memory and the scanner we’re tasked to accomp transmissions by type, there were 13 different types. Four bits gives me 16 alternatives. We were tight on labeled territory during that thing. And this is the point I wanted to make Chris. I learned something that has stayed with me for the last 50 years. And if you’ll indulge me, let me tell you the legend of Joe Klein Kemper. Joe was the second shift, the swing shift supervisor at Buick.
John Hill (18:25):
We were getting considerable pushback from the second shift workforce on the barcode initiative. It was a mystery to them. And then it gave them pause. Vis-a-vis what it’s going to do to their jobs. While brainstorming with Joe one night, I said, you know, what can we do to assure them that the barcode system isn’t going to do anything, but give them more credit, the right kind of credit for the work they’re doing. And he said to me, is there a chance that you guys could print up a puncture, those barcode labels, little rolls of labels, perhaps 10 or 15 labels to a role. I said, what are you going to do with them? And they said, what I’d like to do is we brief our, our workforce every night. And one of our breathing briefings, I’d like to hand those rolls of barcodes out and explain, have you come and explain what they’re being used for within a week or per probably even less than a week of that meeting. Every man, woman and child in Flint, Michigan was wearing a barcode on their front side, on their backside, on their foreheads. What have you, his idea just went through the plant was such a lack Ruthie that we got there obtained through that initiative, which he created total cooperation of the workforce or the barcode program that we’re implementing. Obviously I’ve never forgotten that it’s been critical to every project that I’ve been engaged in.
Chris Barnes (20:19):
What I take away from that, John is that even today, 2020, when you talk about putting warehouse management technology and it warehouse the labor, the people are, they can be resistant because they think it’s going to eliminate their job or, or so I think what you said is even 50 years ago, you were trying to sell the concept as a value add that that was neat.
John Hill (20:40):
Well, you know, over the years I had a very bad habit. I blame the military on it. I smoked and periodically maybe every other hour, I’d go outside to light up and guess who I met outside three quarters of the workforce back then I learned more in a 10 minute spoke break than I did in two hour conference calls or meetings with management. They knew what was going on. And once they knew I was harmless, they suggested that, you know, I might want to start gathering some of their thoughts in the various initiatives with which I was engaged at the time to engage the workforce. If I leave no other message from this podcast, it’s absolutely critical.
Chris Barnes (21:31):
If I recall from that webinar, I just watched. It’s very similar. I think you said you’d obviously didn’t mention Joe, but I think engaging the workforce is one of your key takeaways from that you’re consistent if nothing else.
John Hill (21:43):
Oh, well, thank you for that. You know, you, people have to watch me at this age.
Chris Barnes (21:48):
Were you in the military? I didn’t realize.
John Hill (21:51):
Yeah, well, we did that back then. No option. Right? Well, very little option. Berlin wall went up and that kept me in Europe longer than I had originally planned. But nonetheless, I got engaged with the use of scanners and installed the first railroad scanner on the Swedish national railways main line up in Northern Sweden. Some of the think of, again that was back in 1967, we weren’t the only ones in the barcode business. And we certainly weren’t the only ones in the WMS business, but I happened to have the privilege of being there when they got off the ground,
Chris Barnes (22:38):
Just to wrap up on the military, what branch of service I was in the army
John Hill (22:44):
And I wore playing clothes.
Chris Barnes (22:46):
Well, I’ve got a theory and you’re, you’re adding to my theory about the military. So being a warehouse person that I am, I find that probably 70% of the people I talked to in the warehouse management typically are former military. And I don’t know if it’s, if it’s it’s because they, they teach such, such good logistics skills in the warehouse and in the, in the military, then they transfer. Or if they just teach that, that organizational mentality that you need to run a warehouse. Probably a combination of both.
John Hill (23:17):
Yeah. I think it’s a combination of both. I agree with you. I learned a lot in the military. It wasn’t a waste of my time. Sure. By any stretch.
Chris Barnes (23:26):
Well, for, for any of my students to listening or future students they’ll know, I, when we talk about logistics, I always start off that it’s basically was started by the military. If you look at anything to do with it, moving people, moving the food, moving the resources to the, you know, for the war fonts. It’s kinda a lot of the scattered stuff.
John Hill (23:44):
You know, we have number of good magazines that cover our industry. One of the first was modern materials handling that publication was started by a former senior officer from the U S army who got involved with logistics during world war two. And his first publication was called the palletizer. That $2 will buy you a copy of USA today.
Chris Barnes (24:16):
They’re still John, they’re still popular today. That’s
John Hill (24:22):
Moving,
Chris Barnes (24:22):
Holding things from the conveyor to the pallets and easier for the people. So you just reinforced my theory on the army military and the logistics.
John Hill (24:31):
You’re one of my data points. Thank you. You can call me anytime. You know, after, after we did the work with our friend, Joe Klein, Kemper at Buick, it became obvious that we needed a broader platform to talk our game and we banded together. And I think this is important at least from a historical point of view, with five other companies and formed a group called the automatic identification manufacturers, old aim today. And it operated under the umbrella of MHI who among other things is a treasure trove of information for material handling generally and proud sponsor of the Promap. And MODEC show about the time that we formed. We put an article in another magazine called material handling engineering. It’s all called material handling and logistics in which we said this was 1974. Still the trend in item coding is towards miniaturization. The use of such micro in coding will permit assignment of a unique number to any product whose value warrants tracking, whether it’s an automobile or a shipment of caviar in plant or across the country.
John Hill (26:02):
And we made the prediction that within the next 10 years, that’s from 74 forward such product coding would become commonplace. And in fact, be standardized. Now I’m not quite sure that the 10 year prediction was on the money, but it was close. And the importance of that little excerpt from the article was the standardization component without standardization. Back then, I, I doubt that aim automatic identification member companies, total sales reached 3 million. I just read yesterday that the market now projected to grow to 100 billion by 2025 and not only barcode, but RFID machine imaging, voice data collection, and his brother are included in that number, but that’s a fairly sizable market.
Chris Barnes (27:04):
Yeah, that’s a good place to be. I can take one 10th of it and be happy. I think
John Hill (27:08):
My youngest daughter years ago used to say, daddy, there’s another one of your park copes. I wish I had a hundredth of a cent of each barcode that’s been sold since that time standards have made his app.
Chris Barnes (27:24):
Pre-call I was talking to you about a slightly different topic, John, that containerization, which is again, one of my interesting concepts that I like to study. And that’s really what revolutionized that that industry was. They have ISO standards for 20 foot, 40 foot containers, and obviously all the fast things. And going back to that UPC podcasts that I listened to that that’s one of the things they said was, was successful as it had to be standard. They didn’t want it to be store specific or manufacturer specific. It had to be generic across all industries and all different types of stores. I agree with you, Ben, and that’s where companies like that are still popular today. Atlanta-based now and CR those types of companies. That’s kind of where they got their starts back in the UPC and the barcodes, sixties and seventies. It’s just neat to see that.
Chris Barnes (28:13):
And they’re still around. So another, just from my most, any students that might be listening, as I said, John, I teach supply chain management and a key concept pending on what you’re studying is, is, uh, a I D C automatic identification and collection automatic identification data. And you had mentioned aims. So I assume that that’s related, but just for any students and listen, that is a key, a key topic, and this is an actual practice practitioner’s perspective of it. So, so you were involved in that organization as well AIDC or aim, which was a called, you said
John Hill (28:43):
I was one of the founders, the founders, and it’s just still active. Oh, absolutely. Aim is, uh, its own organization today. It’s a website and it’s amazing what comes out of my older head is aim global one word.org and is obviously global in its breadth. But I think that’s probably where
Chris Barnes (29:07):
I met you. And again, now I can take half of what you’ve been talking about and go back 20 years maybe. And that’s where it was. I was probably at a hotel somewhere, cause you used to travel all the country and probably the world doing these road shows once a week. I would guess. I don’t know what was that? Is that right?
John Hill (29:22):
Traveling a lot. I haven’t traveled much at all in the last two and a half months and I’ve suffered severe withdrawal. I could imagine only withdrawal nothing else. Thank God. Sure. I hope none of our listeners have any, anything contrary that I’ve had anything contrary to that, but that was a big, big draw back then. I mean, anything data collection, it was the was kind of the birth of the warehouse management systems were evolve in becoming, I don’t want to say standard, but becoming mainstream. And you were kind of on the tip of the spear. I mean, you talked about list logistics, which I always thought Manhattan or McHugh Freeman were the originals because you know, that’s when I came of age was the nineties. Right. And that’s what I knew. So I just assumed, I had heard all that being Atlanta, I’d heard all the stories about Manhattan and what they’d done to your credit. You probably heard a lot about it at Georgia tech, correct? Yeah. Yes. There’s a seat and out there, but I recall there was also catalyst was a company that was their exe or Dallas systems like, Oh yeah, they were subsumed by another organization. But literally at our start with the WMS group under the MHI umbrella, we had 29 companies within the first year.
John Hill (30:45):
And there were probably another 150 companies who didn’t join at that time. We’re also offering that technology for similar purposes for applications. I worked at Accenture for awhile and that’s when we were at Anderson consulting. So we were doing a lot with the big players. That’s what I said, MCU, Manhattan and catalyst. But I remember even back then, John Gardner had the, the ratings and everything, and there were, there were 150 200 plus companies in the space. And I think today that’s probably sell as many I can’t. It’s, it’s interesting to see, but they’re not as well known as they used to be. Thanks.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
We’re listening to the first part of this multi-part series. If you’re interested in APEC certifications, there’s a YouTube video where you can learn more about bootcamp style workshops at Georgia tech search on apex bootcamp courses, informational webinar. If you’re in the North Georgia, North Alabama Chattanooga area, check out the traditional class formats offered by the university of Tennessee Chattanooga center for professional education supply chain Academy, optionally, the apex coach can bring supply chain certification workshops to your company. Just send a note to chris@apexcoach.com.
