The Automation used to fulfill Ocado's customer orders

Why is the automation in the warehouses important to Ocado? (Matt Soane)

Ocado has a revolutionary model for the on-line supermarket business and at its core is the ground-breaking automation and robotics technology. Matt Soane will talk about Ocado's unique model and how automation is critical to the Ocado business and for future customers of the 'Smart Platform'.

Evolution from where Ocado started to today’s Rainbow automation (Thomas Robb)

Ocado has been on a journey of discovery in the use of Automation over the last 15 years. In this talk, Thomas Robb will bring this journey to life in terms of the challenges Ocado has faced, the solutions they’ve tried and their successes and occasional failures along the way. What kind of technology does Ocado use?

Why is it difficult and exciting technically? (Dean Sutton)

OPS, Ocado Smart Platform is an awesome concept. Most engineers or technology enthusiast will get the concept straight away and then the ideas start flowing. However, delivering these ideas to a production environment is hard. It takes time and a real product development mindset. In his talk, Dean Sutton will explain how Ocado Technology is using modern software development techniques to write the embedded software that powers the Ocado BOT and how these approaches will evolve over time to enable Ocado’s product to be cheaper, faster, reliable while allowing for ongoing innovation.

• Програма
• Лектори
• Галерия

18:30 – 19:00 REGISTRATION

19:00 – 21:00 PRESENTATIONS & WORKSHOPS

21:00 – 21:30 TALKS & DRINKS

MATT SOANE

Matt is a General Manager of Ocado Technology, with particular responsibility for Ocado's unique warehouse technologies, which include robotics and automation. Matt has spent his career in the software industry, working for companies large (e.g. IBM) and small. He has been at Ocado since 2002, joining as a Senior Engineer/Team Leader. He has been closely involved in all aspects of Ocado's technology journey, originally writing software and then building the software teams to deliver our unique automation technology. He is very interested in agile approaches to software development and continues to have a strong focus on recruiting outstanding engineers and building high-performance teams. Matt is excited by technology and will try and code himself, given half a chance.

THOMAS ROBB

Tom is Head Of Automation Control for Ocado Technology. The Automation Control Department is responsible for the software that directly controls all the automation in the Ocado’s Customer Fulfilment Centre, using a mix of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Embedded C/C++. Thomas studied Physics and the Control Systems at University and his career to date has all been in the control systems industry; first developing control systems for the food and pharmaceuticals industries before moving into material handling and logistics industries both as an engineer and project manager. He joined Ocado in 2004 and in the years since has grown the department from 3 to 40 Engineers and has moved the main role of the department from managing 3rd party code suppliers to in-house system design and code development. He is very proud of the professional and collaborative approach of everyone in the department and the high rates of staff retention. Thomas passion is still for solving Control Systems problems and whilst it has been a while since he has been able to do any significant coding he is still very involved in system design, analysis and the odd bit of debugging.

DEAN SUTTON

Dean is a senior software engineer at Ocado Technology. He is responsible for leading the next generation Software Bot Platform. Dean studied Electrical Engineering at University, focusing on signal processing, digital hardware and nano-technology. However, after realising that no jobs actually exist in those fields in New Zealand, he made the move to embedded systems and more recently towards embedded software. Dean has a number of years experience applying modern software development and manufacturing techniques to embedded software and hardware.