C-Suite Pack Expo Interview: Matt Kohler, Sales Manager at Bastian Solutions

1.) What would you say is the most important takeaway from PACK EXPO 2022?

Packaging and material handling automation is critical to companies’ success right now. Knowing this, more companies are taking a more holistic view of how to apply automation to their end-to-end supply chains.

2.)What are the three key market trends to watch as we roll into 2023?

1. Automation is no longer justified primarily by labor savings. Obviously labor savings is still a big component in a return on investment (ROI) calculation, but with the labor shortages our customers are facing, automation can mean the difference between being able to produce products, or not. Companies are also struggling with employee retention issues. By eliminating monotonous tasks and reducing ergonomic risks, organizations can improve their work environments and position team members to be able to add value to products and processes.
2. Our experience at PACK EXPO showed that there is more cross-pollination of people and technologies between manufacturing/packaging teams and the logistics teams. Going forward, I think we’ll see more traditional packaging solutions used in warehouses and more traditional logistics solutions supporting manufacturing and packaging processes.
3. Packaging and material handling automation implementations are typically funded by capital expenditures (CapEx). While I think CapEx will remain the primary payment method for automation, I do believe that we’ll see more adoption of Robots as a Service (RaaS) in the industry. Factors like rising interest rates and flexible production that must scale up and down quickly based on seasonal demand will make RaaS-type models more appealing.

3.) How has your organization positioned itself to help warehouse and DC management operations prepare for future growth?

Bastian Solutions takes a consultative approach to working with our customers to solve their challenges. We strive to understand our customers’ businesses as thoroughly as possible so we can offer them the most optimized solution for their current needs while ensuring that we are planning the system to accommodate the future growth they expect. An independent integrator, Bastian Solutions manufactures some of the equipment that we integrate and we also have partnerships with industry-leading companies. This combination helps us offer the best technology on the market. That technology meets our customers’ immediate needs and can also scale in a cost-effective manner. In fact, many of our customers return a couple years post-initial implementation to execute the designed expansion of our systems that we previously implemented.

At Bastian, we also spend a great deal of effort evaluating emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence Powered Vision. At PACK EXPO we introduced Bastian Solutions SmartPick, our robotic each picking system, that utilizes Covariant’s AI Vision. These emerging technologies are enabling new use cases for robots, which means we can return to previous implementations and add automation that wasn’t previously possible. This, in turn, helps our customers accelerate their return on investment.