wf-warehousing-alexa

Inspiration

Hi everyone I am Ameet Chhatwal and I am an engineer in Wayfair's Warehouse Management Systems a.k.a WMS team. In my recent warehouse trip to Hebron and Erlanger, KY, I got to see to see our code and development in action. Warehouse is a vast building with infinite doors on each side, with millions of units of inventory and miles of conveyor belts. Warehousing is a highly transactional business with so much happening on the floor across so many operations. I wanted to learn so much about was going on the floor and I thought how cool it will be if there was a virtual assistant which could answer all my questions and even help warehouse leads to do they job efficiently. My Hackathon project of creating a POC smart warehousing assistant is a result of my warehouse trip.

What it does

The Alexa skill, can give quick updates of different warehouse operations and help employees in different job roles.

Picking Supervisor can ask Alexa : Can I release orders?

Yard management admins can ask: What is todays truck schedule?

Shipping/Loading leads can ask : What is going on at door number 20?

Warehouse IT can ask: How is picking/loading/shipping operation health?

Applications of IOT in warehousing are numerous. This is just my small attempt to create a proof of concept to show how a virtual assistant can help.

How I built it

I built the assistant as a Alexa Skill which can run on Amazon echo devices. It uses AWS Lambda functions and Alexa SDK.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I went from knowing nothing about the Alexa skill development to creating a functional app in one weekend is what makes me happy. This hackathon weekend helped me break the procrastination of being a alexa-skill developer from just being a user of Alexa skills.

What I learned

I brainstormed about so many different use cases an assistant can help in a warehouse. It also fun to learn the technology, so mission accomplished.

What's next for wf-warehousing-alexa

As mentioned the uses are numerous so I would love to get feedback from people about this POC, especially real users in the warehouses, and implement feature that would help them the most and integrate it with real Wayfair services.