Intelligent Software for Warehouse Robots
Commerce in the digital age requires sophisticated software to increase efficiency, safety, and speed in warehouse environments
Transforming Warehouse Management with AI-Powered Robots
To ensure the timely delivery of the project and achieve project milestones, MedAcuity was enlisted as a collaborative partner for expertise in algorithm development, Windows Microservices migration, and test automation.
project snapshot
SITUATION
- An industry leading warehouse automation company faced challenges scaling its system by an order of magnitude.
- The original system wasn’t designed for such a significant increase in scale, creating technical challenges.
- Organizational growth caused bandwidth issues at the technical management level. This led to bottlenecks in the integration process between dependencies.
Challenges
- The system had to be redesigned and rearchitected for the new release. It needed to handle a 4X increase in warehouse robot traffic and logistics.
- Incomplete, outdated, or unavailable documentation hindered knowledge sharing within the mobile robot tasking and routing team. This made it difficult to track application development and maintain optimal velocity.
- The lack of Agile scrum methodology and continuous integration led to unclear project timelines. This caused frequent adjustments to completion schedules.
- A siloed team environment resulted in poor communication and reduced productivity. It also led to redundancies, rework, and a lack of trust among stakeholders.
- With each software update or code deployment, bugs were reported regularly. A task team had to address in field issues.
- There was an urgent need to improve test coverage and accuracy pre release. This was essential to meet deadlines and reduce post-deployment in field issues.
SOLUTION
- MedAcuity engineers led development activities, providing direct input on the software design for intelligent software for warehouse robots.
- To improve knowledge sharing and software development, MedAcuity created a documentation repository. This also accelerated the technical ramp up.
- A MedAcuity project manager, with input from key management and director level stakeholders, set up a Jira board to track all activities. The board summarized ongoing, completed, and at risk tasks with a prioritization scale (high, medium, low).
- MedAcuity developed a test automation framework to help the client transition from manual testing to automated testing. This accelerated testing and improved accuracy.
Results
- With MedAcuity’s expertise, optimized software was delivered to meet the 4X scaling criteria for Intelligent Software for Warehouse Robotics.
- Introducing an Agile scrum process improved team collaboration. This helped the team catch up and get the project back on track.
- Using a Jira board improved reporting accuracy and made project completion more predictable. The dashboard also increased visibility, enhancing collaboration among team members.
- Transferring knowledge on software engineering best practices will strengthen the internal team’s capabilities moving forward.
- The team achieved a 90% pass rate using test automation, the highest in the company’s history.
- A team of eight MedAcuity software engineers and a project manager worked seamlessly in a hybrid model, on site and on call to address field integration issues.
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