From Shock to Strategy 2025

A lack of central command visibility led DHL in Memphis to multiple isolated departmental decisions, ultimately hindering productivity. The facility established a control centre that incorporated relevant business metrics and reporting to enhance visibility and optimize operations. The control tower features a centralized visualization of critical information, including warehouse management system data, mechanical material handling equipment and a robotic picking dashboard. This visibility helps identify inefficiencies in processes and enables immediate resolution. The robotic picking dashboard has already pinpointed inventory clustering due to an inefficient slotting strategy, which resulted in high congestion. Recognizing this prompted a change in how slotting was executed, leading to an 11% increase in picking efficiency, a 25% reduction in consolidation cycle time and a 71% decrease in picking cycle time.USE CASE Digital logistics control tower: DHL Supply Chain, Memphis, United States During the battery-sealing pin-welding process at CATL in Liyang, extremely small pinhole defects (as small as 0.016 mm), which are difficult to detect visually, may occur. To mitigate this, helium detection has traditionally been used, leading to very high gas consumption annually. By using high-precision 3D cameras, AI and edge computing, large amounts of process image data – both good and defective – has been used to train AI inspection models that achieve extremely low rates of false positives and missed defects. As a result, CATL has eliminated the helium gas detection processes, reducing helium consumption to zero and saving both cleanroom space and the capital cost of equipment.USE CASE AI-enabled elimination of final helium leakage detection process: Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), Liyang, China From Shock to Strategy: Building Value Chains for the Next 30 Years 13