Transcript
Lior Tal: Hello. My name is Leo Tal, and I'm the CEO of Cyngn. For the past few months, we've been developing a partnership with the Columbia Vehicle Group, a leading industrial vehicle manufacturer.
The Stock Chaser is one of the most widely used industrial vehicles in the material handling space. You can find it in thousands of industrial sites throughout the US and across the world. By adding Cyngn’s Drive more autonomous vehicle technology to stock chasers and other industrial vehicles, we're transforming the way material handling and logistic organizations get work done. Our autonomous vehicles help them overcome labor shortages, increase safety, and reduce their costs.
In November, we deployed autonomous Stock Chasers to a warehouse operated by Global Logistics and Fulfillment. For our earning call today, we thought it would be useful to get representatives from both Global Logistics and Fulfillment and Columbia to tell you a little bit more about the Cyngn partnership, our autonomous vehicle technology, and the value these relationships are already bringing to both organizations.
Please enjoy.
Greg Breckley: My name is Greg Breckley. I'm the director of Business Development at Columbia.
Kenn Morris: I'm Kenn Morris.I'm the Vice President of Global Logistics and Fulfillment.
Greg Breckley: The challenges we're seeing a lot of our customers facing today are related to supply chain. We're facing that as a manufacturer as well.
Kenn Morris: Like a lot of logistics companies, one of the things that we're dealing with is the rapid growth in the industry and higher labor costs are a major issue. Making sure that we can find and grow in the space that we need, as well as just providing more innovative services to our customers.
Greg Breckley: Columbia realized that our customers were looking for additional solutions that we currently couldn't offer. We began looking for a partner that could provide autonomous solutions, and Cyngn was top of the list. We sat through an interview process and selected Cyngn from a number of different robotics companies we interviewed.
Kenn Morris: When we started the pilot project here in our facility, I wasn't sure what to expect. That's the reality. We received a big crate, it was opened up by the folks from Cyngn, and inside is this amazing high tech piece of equipment.
Normally, we would take a lot of our product that we're packing for our customers and someone would manually or sometimes we use a forklift to take it to the shipping location and our facility. And in this case, we actually had set up the route so that it would pass by that Fulfillment team so they could easily every 15, 20, 30 minutes, they could drop their product on it and have it directly taken to our shipping area.
Greg Breckley: Prior to Autonomy, every phase of Pick and Pack needed an employee. Both picking on the shelves, the transporting, horizontal material handling, and the unloading at the other end. With Autonomy, we no longer need the employee in the middle. Employees can stay focused on picking and packing parts where they make a 3PL the most money.
Kenn Morris: One of the surprising things for us or for me when we did this project I didn't realize how quickly the team would actually start becoming accustomed to the autonomous vehicle. It got to be the point that when the pilot was over a lot of our team basically looked around and said, “Hey, where's the vehicle? Where's the vehicle?”
And so they not only were able to help the program it to make sure that it stopped a certain amount of time and were able to load up their products easily onto it, but really did kind of work it into their daily operations and we're using it enough that they complained about it when the pilot stopped.
Greg Breckley: I think some of the things that make it so wonderful for us to work with Cyngn are the people. We're a relationships driven company and finding another company that's full of real people has been great. Additionally, the speed to action has been phenomenal.
Kenn Morris: I think that one of the important things for logistics companies like ours to think about is how we are going to integrate innovations into our industry.
Greg Breckley: An autonomous vehicle really unlocks the opportunity for us to address labor challenges that we have never been able to address. Our vehicles have always needed an operator. Not needing an operator has opened endless possibility of opportunities for us.
Kenn Morris: Being able to have the chance to work with Cyngn on an autonomous vehicle implementation is something that really opens our eyes up to the possibilities and it's part of what we are expecting to plan for in the future as well.