YCH Group stays competitive with tech
Using drones to manage inventory and its key warehouse is just one of the ways the Singapore-based supply chain company looks to set itself apart from the competition
One company is making the traditionally staid world of warehouse management exciting, with a little help from technology.
Manually counting inventory is a chore, says Robert Yap, the executive chairman of YCH Group. It makes for dull work, and if items are counted wrongly, everything has to be counted from the top all over again.
"If you use the manual system, it could effectively take you two days to count inventory. With drones, it's just one, two hours," Yap tells CNBC's Managing Asia.
Among the high-tech logistics solutions the company has adopted are automated storage and retrieval systems, drone inventory management and radio-frequency identification (RFID). All of these are put to use in Supply Chain City, the YCH Group's US$163 million automated flagship warehouse - the largest of its kind in Asia.
The YCH Group has a history of switching things up. The company had originally been in the passenger transportation sector when Yap first joined the family business.
"I changed [our focus] to cargo transportation and from [that], we moved up the value chain to include warehousing, international freight forwarding and integrated logistics," Yap explains, "As we were migrating the value chain, I sort of fell in love with [the business]."