KION & Accenture: Warehouse Optimisation through NVIDIA AI
As warehouse and supply chain optimisation grows ever critical for manufacturers, one industry leader is going the extra mile with AI.
KION GROUP AG, a global provider of industrial trucks and supply chain solutions is working with Accenture to enhance its warehouses and supply chains using NVIDIA's sophisticated simulation and AI technologies.
Showcasing the results at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, KION has used NVIDIA's Mega Omniverse blueprint to develop large-scale industrial twins.
These digital twins are powered by physical AI (artificial intelligence which operates based on the principles of real-life physics).
Utilising this AI has been critical to improving the group's smart warehouse systems, that feature automated forklifts, smart cameras and the latest robotics and automation solutions.
“At KION, we leverage AI-driven solutions as an integral part of our strategy to optimise our customers’ supply chains and increase their productivity,” says Rob Smith, CEO of KION GROUP AG.
“With NVIDIA’s AI leadership and Accenture’s expertise in digital technologies, we are reinventing warehouse automation.
"Bringing these strong partners together, we are creating a vision for future warehouses that are part of a smart agile system, evolve with the world around them and can handle nearly any supply chain challenge.
"This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of industrial automation to usher in a new era of supply chain efficiency.”
Accenture: A critical partner
Accenture has been a critical partner throughout this venture, working with KION to develop a vital interactive application for the CES showcase.
This application tracks how digital robot fleet and facility planning and testing enhances warehouse key performance indicators, such as task completion time, throughput, safety incidents and error rates.
Accenture's expertise has also been vital due to its close ties to NVIDIA.
With its own portfolio of AI solutions including its AI refinery, Accenture partnered with NVIDIA in October of last year to create the Accenture NVIDIA business group.
This group will help industrial clients scale Agentic AI systems, the next frontier of generative AI to optimise supply chains, warehouses, operations and more.
“Modernising supply chains to make them more resilient and agile, with real-time flexibility, is the next digital frontier,” says Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO at Accenture.
“This collaboration with our long-term client KION and partner NVIDIA will break exciting new ground in not only reinventing the warehouse, but also in raising their performance standards with technology, data and AI, helping our clients operate autonomous, safe supply chains that better serve their customers and consumers, enhance productivity and efficiency and create new value.”
Planning warehouses & training robots
Today's warehouses and fulfillment centers blend automated and manual systems, like human workers and industrial robots, making them complex to manage and oversee.
These environments need to be both highly adaptable and extremely reliable to effectively respond to changing inventory and demand needs.
NVIDIA and Accenture have enabled KION GROUP AG to pursue this ideal.
The company can create digital twins of warehouses that enable facility operators to design optimised warehouse configuration without halting operations for testing.
Operators can experiment and test the number and layout of robots, workers and automation equipment. They can also examine the behaviour of robot fleets and intelligent vehicles.
Critically, NVIDIA's Omniverse and Mega software also enables superior training of warehouse robots, giving operators the ability to run simulations that cover changing conditions like inventory and demand fluctation.
This is all integrated with KION's warehouse management software, meaning they can use the digital twin to assign tasks like transferring goods to virtual robots.
Next steps with NVIDIA
The next step for the partners is to integrate the digital twin with a precise vision language model designed to capture real time insights from warehouses.
This will significantly reduce the risk of accidents and bottlenecks by pairing cameras, robots and NVIDIA NIM.
NVIDIA NIM is a set of services designed for the deployment of foundation models in edge devices, adding to the company's impressive portfolio of solutions designed to create smarter, more autonomous warehouses.
“Future warehouses will function like massive autonomous robots, orchestrating fleets of robots within them,” says Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
“By integrating Omniverse and Mega into their solutions, KION and Accenture can dramatically accelerate the development of industrial AI and autonomy for the world’s distribution and logistics ecosystem.”
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