Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, In Command Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 5 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard and video chatting ability, as well as several other capabilities that were made available to them that they did not have before. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. The size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 2 million square feet. Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.in-cmd.com.
“Culture will eat strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, anytime.” This was the first sentence that the professor of marketing and strategy uttered during our first MBA class at Georgia Tech. He underlined his point with the story of how Kellogg's tried to conquer the Indian market with its breakfast cereal. (Source: Pixabay) The company…
One of my customers, a bulk picking department manager, asked an intriguing question the other day: How can I keep my employees motivated and working hard? His organization had deployed our wearable devices a year or so ago, and I had called on him to check in and see how they were being used and…
As a participant in the recent Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) Supply Chain & Mobility Panel, we talked about the benefits of deploying mobile capabilities in the supply chain. The audience was comprised of Atlanta-based supply chain practitioners. I was invited to share my perspective from a data collection, collaboration, order fulfillment perspective in…
Fifteen years ago, after I had joined a supply chain vendor as a developer, I encountered a product called Jwalk (a unit-testing tool for the Java programming language). After a week of training with the software, I was given a funny little dongle that had to be plugged in the back of the PC to…
A picture is worth a thousand words and a story is worth a thousand pictures. It's little wonder, then, that people often long to describe a problem with a picture. In their personal lives, technology savvy people snap a picture and send it off to get a problem solved. And yet, within the supply chain,…
For many electronics companies, outsourcing certain aspects of the logistics process can lead to better business and improved customer support. By working with the right third party logistics (3PL or 4PL) companies, these manufacturers can stand out from the competition by offering new and better services. 3PL or 4PL companies provide a variety of services: …
Back in 1995, when I went to see a movie called Disclosure, the story line about sexual harassment in corporate America was OK, but what really fascinated us was this thing called virtual reality. In the movie, the virtual world was used to store confidential information in a system of files and folders within the…
When I came to the U.S. back in 1999, I got some ribbing about the “green screen” technology I was working on from others who, like me, had envisioned coming to America to work on cool, modern technologies (such as Java, HTML, JavaScript, etc.). I had taken the opening I got, working on the IBM…
When we talk about leadership in the technology sector, it's critical to start with a shared understanding of what leadership really is. There are plenty of misconceptions about what leadership is. Let's start with looking at what leadership isn't. True leaders are not: Dominating. Leaders don't talk in loud voices with intent to suppress…
It is time to call out the elephant in the room: in the technology space in the U.S., there is a serious lack of multicultural leadership. When I say leadership, I'm referring to the ability of techies (read programmers or developers) to inspire a multicultural organization, and to be the torchbearer who shines a light…