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The Future of Work: Keeping beers cold, bananas ‘just right’, from the warehouse to the doorstep

SINGAPORE — There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes from the time you click to buy a bunch of bananas or a six-pack of beer online, to the time they are delivered to you. Keeping fruits fresh and the beer cold is just one of many considerations.

Pickers working at RedMart, for Job Series story on E-Commerce.

Pickers working at RedMart, for Job Series story on E-Commerce.

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Late last year, a study by consulting firm McKinsey estimated that almost a quarter of work activities in Singapore could be displaced by 2030. At the same time, however, a vast amount of jobs will be created, with new technologies spawning many more jobs than they destroyed, the study pointed out. The introduction of the personal computer, for example, has enabled the creation of 15.8 million net new jobs in the United States in the last few decades, even after accounting for jobs displaced.

In a new weekly series, TODAY looks at The Future of Work — the emerging jobs fuelled by technological advancements which may not even have existed a few years back, but are set to proliferate within the next decade or so. In the second instalment, we feature the growing pool of e-commerce professionals who are taking the national past-time of shopping to a whole new level.

SINGAPORE — There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes from the time you click to buy a bunch of bananas or a six-pack of beer online, to the time they are delivered to you. Keeping fruits fresh and the beer cold is just one of many considerations.

At online grocer RedMart, it is a complex operation comprising an automated tool that helps staff members decide where items should be placed in its mammoth warehouse in Jurong, which holds more than 100,000 products.

To ensure items stay fresh, a system triggers warnings of impending temperature fluctuations — up to 24 hours before these "breaches" happen — so that supervisors may act on them.

The automated optimisation tool measures the "sales velocity" of an item, to determine where it is to be placed. The sales velocity refers to the frequency at which items are sold and when their shelves need replenishing.

Items are also grouped according to their "affinity" with other products and placed strategically in the 150,000sqf warehouse. For instance, customers usually order pasta along with sauces and seasoning, so these items are put together.

Mr Theo Ariandi, 25, who was an industrial engineer with RedMart's warehouse technology team, said: "We need to find slow-moving items which have affinity with the fast-moving items — for example if you're looking at pasta, a very generic product, it can move very fast. But for one pasta, there could be five different sauces that are suitable with that pasta, so … we need to find which one is most suitable for that pasta (to group them together)."

Mr Ariandi, who has a master's degree in supply chain management from the National University of Singapore, has contributed to changing the processes that run e-commerce, redefining the way people shop for everything from groceries to clothes to electronic goods.

Theo Ariandi, Industrial Engineer with RedMart, for Job Series story on E-Commerce. Photo: Raj Nadarajan/TODAY

PAVING THE WAY FOR PICKERS AND PACKERS

Explaining why an optimisation tool is a must for a warehouse of this scale, Mr Ariandi told TODAY that placing all the fast-moving items together will lead to congestion in certain areas, as pickers converge on the same spot. "Hence, we spread the fast-moving items here and there."

Working in the warehouse are "pickers", who move along the aisles of the rows of shelves to pick the products customers have ordered. Once that is done, they take the items to the packing station, where the "packers" are.

Apart from shortening the distance pickers have to travel to get an item within the warehouse, the automated tool also helps the workers so that the number of times they have to replenish items is cut down.

Items on promotion are, for instance, assigned bigger slots in the warehouse to cater for a surge in demand. Then, as their promotional periods draw to a close, they will be replaced by other items featured in upcoming promotions.

While he acknowledged that it is difficult to quantify the manpower, time and cost savings the tool has brought, Mr Ariandi said that RedMart has kept the number of daily replenishments at the same level, even when the number of orders rose two- or three-fold.

Among other things, the tool also takes into account how the items are zoned, to ensure stringent food hygiene and safety standards set by the authorities.

For example, if ready-to-eat smoked turkey gains popularity during Thanksgiving and requires more spots in the facility, the model will ensure that should the supplies of smoked turkey overflow to the racks with raw meat, "it will also trigger the replacement of raw meat to another location", Mr Ariandi said.

Based on standards stipulated by the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore, raw meat should not be placed near ready-to-eat meat, or fruits and vegetables.

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STAYING COOL

Apart from where they are placed, food items also have to stay fresh, and the key to this is temperature control.

About 1.5 years ago, Mr Ariandi, working with a colleague who is a software developer, as well as RedMart's quality assurance team, set out to develop a temperature forecasting tool for the warehouse.

In compiling temperature records, the team incorporated historical data in an effort to determine the seasonality of temperatures. They took into account factors such as the times of day when temperatures are at their highest — 1pm or 2pm — and their coolest, which is at night.

Other factors that may account for temperatures changes — such as the maintenance of its coolers, which happens twice or thrice a day — were also considered and worked into the calculations.

If temperatures go beyond a certain range, the system triggers an alert to the quality assurance and operations teams, notifying them that there could be a surge in 12, 18 or 24 hours.

"Because of the expertise of the quality assurance manager, he will right away know… bananas won't ripen so fast, mangoes will excrete certain types of chemicals that will affect the other fruits beside them. They will go to all the 'risky' items, take them out and put them somewhere else," Mr Ariandi said.

Supervisors will then get to the nub of the problem, which could be a door left ajar, a forklift that is generating heat or "too many suppliers coming into the dock".

If the temperature remains high, the fault could lie with its cooler system, and its infrastructure team or building management will be notified.

This forecasting tool has been life-changing for staff members. The quality assurance managers need not have to take readings from specific temperature probes on the wall, record and put the data in an Excel spreadsheet, and then endure the tedium of assessing products for their risk of going bad.

Now that this process has been automated, they can focus on more important tasks, such as training pickers to assess the freshness of products.

BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO AN OLD ROLE

Mr Jason Iafolla, senior manager with RedMart's warehouse technology team, said that an industrial engineer's role existed even before the advent of e-commerce, although it used to lean more towards measuring metrics, which included costs and quality of operational processes, driving lean-business process improvements and removing defects in products.

While these duties are still relevant, Mr Iafolla said that the rise of e-commerce has brought a "significant influx" of resources into the logistics field, as well as "pressure from intense fast-moving competition to do it better than the previous guy".

Part of the job scope now for an industrial engineer could include handling data analytics as well as people and project management.

"Bottomline is, you need to wear the hat of whatever role is needed to get the job done," he said.

Describing industrial engineers as being central to a company's innovation process, Mr Iafolla said that they need to understand how logistics works and the impact of e-commerce on logistics, and have the creativity to come up with bold and feasible solutions.

Mr Patrick Teo, RedMart's chief product officer and executive vice-president for engineering, said that the company is looking to hire 30 industrial and software engineers and product designers this year.

This is fuelled by the growth of its business, as it builds new features and functionalities such as applications and tools, both software and hardware.

Apart from functional skills, the company is also looking for candidates who are customer-centric and focused on the end-user in their work, resourceful and able to work independently.

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