28 Mar Three key trends driving smart locker adoption
There are many benefits for businesses in gaining greater visibility and control over IT peripherals and logistics and warehousing assets. Lisa Cooper, Sales Director of Smart Lockers at Ricoh, explains how Smart Lockers fit into the digital transformation and hybrid workforce challenges that forward-thinking enterprises are experiencing.
IT, Operations and Logistics managers know the workplace is changing fast. In fact, they’re at the forefront of that change. They have researched new technologies to meet the growing demand for workplace digitisation. Further, they have had to find solutions that enable their businesses to maximise the productivity of employees in an increasingly disbursed workforce. Finally, they have usually had to achieve all these things within tight cost and time constraints.
Retail, corporate and logistics businesses are always on the lookout for smart solutions. They want to improve employee efficiency and end user experience. At Ricoh, we are seeing more and more interest in our Smart Locker technology to deliver exactly those benefits.
Whether viewed from an IT or a warehousing/logistics perspective, Smart Lockers give businesses greater visibility and control over inventory items. These can include computer peripherals, handheld devices and headsets. They help improve productivity and reduce costs. Being secure and contactless, they allow the provision of a 24-hour self-service process for employees to collect or deposit these kinds of assets when they need to. This means no waiting, and no need for additional IT or warehousing staff to be on duty to accept or distribute the items. Unlike some storage solutions, Smart Lockers do not limit who can store assets.
Ricoh and Trimble
One of Ricoh’s customers using the Smart Locker solution is industrial technology company Trimble, which installed Smart Lockers to gain better control over the handheld scanners used by employees at its distribution centre in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Previously, nobody supervised the collection and return of these scanners, and employees frequently damaged or lost them.
Distribution Manager Enzio Hermkens said of the Smart Lockers: “This has saved us a lot of time and money and greatly reduced scanner loss. The right person receives notifications of the scanner’s location. With real-time reporting, we have a constant overview of the status of the scanners.”
Smart Lockers impressed Coventry City Council with the amount of information their cloud-based software makes available. The council also praised the self-service distribution of IT peripherals, including new starter kits for new employees. ICT Engagement Lead Gary Griffiths said: “I think it is a very powerful thing to have that granular level of detail about how, where and what volume of peripherals have been consumed.”
These organisations, and others, are grappling with three significant trends in the 21st Century workplace, and with each of those trends – as we see below – Smart Lockers can provide very real benefits:
Digital transformation
Digital and cloud-based technology is helping businesses to realise process improvements through automation and real-time traceability and control. In turn, they’re enjoying enhanced efficiency and productivity. A by-product of this is an increased capability to track and control a wide range of physical or electronic business assets, and their utilisation rates, without labour-intensive or time-bound manual distribution and collection processes.
Smart Lockers fit precisely into such a scenario, specifically in terms of tracking and controlling IT and warehousing assets. They facilitate self-service, thereby unleashing employee productivity. They can also be integrated with existing software widely used among businesses, such as Service Now, making the transformation simple for everyone to engage with. Issues with equipment and peripherals can also be dealt with in a timely manner. The Smart Locker system sends automatic emails to the relevant people or departments to initiate corrective action.
Workplace productivity
Consider these scenarios. Staff members have to queue up to get their devices or equipment when they get to work, and queue up again to give it back at home time. They might spend time searching through several devices, looking for the one they like to use best. Having picked up their device, they find the battery is low and their work is soon disrupted as a fully charged device is sought. They might damage a device – accidentally or otherwise – and fail to hand it back in.
These are all scenarios where the business is accruing extra costs and losing productive time from the workforce. Smart Lockers remove the queues, ensure full usage of all equipment, not just the favourites. They also enable tracking of a device to a staff member. This instills a sense of personal responsibility, and gives the business full accountability. Smart Lockers can be supplied with charging points, so that devices will be fully charged when collected. Few businesses know how much these kinds of delays and interruptions are costing them – Smart Lockers simply remove the cost at a stroke.
Hybrid working
It is well established that the modern workforce is no longer one that checks in every weekday at its place of employment at 9 am and leaves at 5 pm. People work remotely, they split their working time between home and office. They hold irregular hours and conduct cloud-based video conferences.
This fundamentally changes the nature of their need for IT support. They don’t necessarily need face-to-face support during “normal” working hours, which means the IT department must itself be more flexible. Smart Lockers provide many aspects of that flexibility. IT staff can pre-stock lockers with equipment that employees can pick up when convenient. You can track accessories and peripherals to specific employees, preventing abuse and enabling better management of inventory and utilisation rates. You can extend your IT department service hours to 24/7 self-service, without the ongoing expense of human resources at all times of day.
Conclusion
The workplace has changed in fundamental ways. Businesses now organise and equip their employees differently. Digital and cloud-based technology is capable of delivering real-time control and efficiency. Ricoh’s vision, articulated through its Leading Change at Work campaign, is to create a seamless digital workspace experience. Smart Lockers are a part of that unified digital workspace solution – one that, as the examples above illustrate, is already delivering smart value for business enterprises.
Click here to learn more about smart storage lockers, how they work and their potential applications.
Click to read The Key to Smart Asset Management
