Microsoft has announced a preview of Lenovo’s Digital Distribution Center (DDC) in collaboration with the company and Nvidia. the IoT solution uses real-time package detection, tracking, and validation to better inform and optimize distribution in retail, manufacturing, and logistics.
According to Microsoft, the tech combined NVIDIA DeepStream with Azure IoT Edge to provide all kinds of insight. By analyzing multiple channels of 1080p video streams, it can, for example, understand when packages are damaged or missing. The solution learns and grows as it gets more data, better suiting itself to the environment.
“Within the four walls of the distribution center, picking and packing tasks account for more than 50 percent of the total labor cost of warehousing operations,” said Bert Van Hoof, partner group program manager, Azure IoT. “Space constraints and difficulty in staffing are pushing companies to look at adopting distribution center technologies that cut labor costs, optimizes the flow of products, and improves productivity and utilization of these centers.”
Now in Limited Preview
Today marks the official preview of Lenovo’s technology, which was built on Microsoft’s Azure IoT central. The company says this makes the distribution centers easy to connect and monitor IoT devices and focus instead on solving customer needs.
Microsoft has committed $5 billion to industry IoT development, and it plans to use part of the investment to add even more to DDC. In the future, DDC will also support palletization, last-mile sorting, geofencing alerts, and more.
It’s currently being showcased at Microsoft’s partner conference, Inspire, in Las Vegas. However, users can gain access to a preview by manually emailing Lenovo at [email protected].
