Ware CEO Ian Smith has previously how talked about how his solution helps warehouses automate their inventory tracking and process with drones. The amount of data that his solution gathers in warehouses is massive, which is part of the reason that Smith has always considered Ware to be a data company, not a drone company. That distinction is especially evident with today’s announcement that Ware is using the Skydio 2 drone to launch the first complete warehouse inventory automation system.

Ware’s solution was designed to help their warehouse customers increase the accuracy and frequency of their inventory tracking, while simultaneously reducing its cost. In assembling the world's largest dataset of warehouse inventory, the company has aims to process data in different ways to showcase to customers where and how to best locate and keep track of their inventory in a complete manner. Now though, the Skydio 2 is going to help them capture this data in a way that is as simple as it is powerful. 

“As a potential customer, you can think of our system as a full inventory automation solution,” Smith told Commercial UAV News. “The drone is just the data collection vehicle. It's a tool that we deploy to capture the images we need in order to apply our machine learning algorithms to. In the future, we’ll be able to offer other interesting solutions by using the existing drones already in our customers' facilities.”

Ware’s mission is to help warehouses never have to worry about cycle counting again. In offering the first turnkey, enterprise-grade inventory automation product, the company is utilizing automation on multiple levels to highlight insights that go beyond a simple inventory count or assessment. The benefits associated with automatically increasing the frequency and accuracy of warehouse inventory can be achieved in whatever way is best for a given user though.

“There are quite a few ways that automation can be applied to warehouses,” Smith continued. “There's software, robotics, and other hardware that's sometimes as simple as conveyor belts. We work deeply in the software and robotics area. When looking closer at robotics automation, most of them are involved in physically affecting material goods by moving them around to help human workers. Our system is technically doing remote sensing of the state of the facility. We can provide these automated status reports and health check-ups to proactively alert the operators of any issues so that they can stay ahead of the curve and work faster.”

Skydio CEO Adam Bry mentioned that the Skydio 2’s visual navigation system has made it possible to deliver on the potential that many people have seen with indoor warehousing products for years now. The new system from Ware uses drones to capture images of every bin location in a facility, giving operators a visual audit history of the status of their inventory and proactively alerting them to potential issues. All of this information will be utilized to open up brand new opportunities in the present and future.

That awareness of inventory is set to change expectations around what it means to keep an accurate track and count of everything in order to positively impact the entire upstream and downstream supply chain. Providing warehouse stakeholders with a full inventory solution has been the goal of Ware since the company was founded, and this news underscores their commitment to achieving that goal.

 

For more information about Ware, visit: http://getware.com