Podcast: The pulse of ProMat 2025 — Top trends and breakthrough technologies in manufacturing and materials handling
ProMat 2025, held at Chicago’s McCormick Place, offered attendees a preview of the latest manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain equipment and systems the industry has to offer. The event brought together over 50,000 manufacturing and supply chain buyers and 1,100 solution providers who were eager to learn, engage, and connect with the leading trends in equipment and technology solutions. With four keynotes and more than 100 seminars, ProMat 2025 offered practical demonstrations of the latest technologies and innovations while facilitating strong business partnerships. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, IndustryWeek editor in chief Robert Schoenberger offers listeners a recap of the event and its many tech innovations.
Below are a few quotes from the ProMat 2025 show floor:
“I've not only been at ProMat for two days, but I've been at ProMat for probably 20 years, since the early 2000s. The one thing I've noticed this year, probably more than in recent years, is they're just trying to make technology easier to use. They’re bringing in enough technology that it's almost at a basic enough level so that if you have labor issues, if you have to continually train new people or hire new people, it doesn't matter. Or at least that's the promise of the technology. There should be a process where you can just get up to work, get up to speed, get people going and working on moving products through the warehouse as fast as possible, as accurately as possible, as efficiently as possible, as safely as possible. That’s the message here. I've seen a lot of technology, and it seems like the promise of AI might still be the promise rather than the reality, but I think we're getting closer. I think you've seen a lot of instances of AI, or at least automation that's enhanced with AI, making things that we never thought about before possible.”
“Well, I thought [the HeroWear exoskeleton] looked really cool. And I think from an ergonomics perspective, it's beneficial because it would help team members who are doing repetitive motion not injure themselves. It took away at least 25% of the weight of the product that I was trying to lift, and it felt smooth.”
“Part of the issue for verticality is it's just hard getting the right size of a warehouse or distribution center. I think the trend right now is companies don't want a million-square-foot facility. They’d rather have a 100,000-square-foot facility. It's just hard finding that kind of real estate because it's like with houses right now. As soon as one comes on the market, they get snatched up. So how do you account for that? You go up rather than out.”
“The solution that we are bringing here is an autonomous inventory management solution that uses a drone-based scanning approach to intelligently scan your warehouse. The drone, as it flies, is executing a preplanned mission. It is localizing in real time, repositioning itself within the front of the bin locations and capturing images of the contents of those bin locations. Once the drone has executed its mission, we take the information, the images that it has gathered, and we generate a suite of analytical insights from that.”
“We started with following technology in 2019 with this idea that robots are often put in places where humans can't go. So, we want to bridge that gap, and we want robots and humans to interact and work together. So, we study how humans move, and then we program our robots to move like them and to follow them in spaces that they exist in.”
“There are AMRs all around, but this is the first that has a self-balancing sensor so they can go up a 15-grade slope carrying a massive load capacity of 1,800 lbs. So, we have a lot of clients who have really old warehouses, and those old warehouses have ramps leading down into assembly zones or production zones, loading zones. And those are around 10- to 15-grade slopes. This is really useful for them.”
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.