Smart Gladiator Wearable Featured in IndustryWeek Magazine

industrywekk-magazine-featureInnovation Lab Helps Small Manufacturers Grow

Beginning as a start-up Smart Gladiator found an ecosystem in Georgia that helped these companies expand.

Sometimes having an idea isn’t enough. Sometimes a small company needs a boost to bring its product to those that need it most.

That’s what happened to Smart Gladiator LLC, a manufacturer of wearable scanning technology, based in Atlanta. Puga Sankara founded the company after he saw the need to improve the process of how companies were tracking their inventory.

 “Workers need a user-friendly, comfortable way, to track products in the distribution centers,” says Sankara. “With the volume coming through these centers and workers having to lug around heavy components that disrupted their workflow, wearables offer a great solution.”

 So, in 2013, he created a company and set up shop at Technology Square which is located in Atlanta. According to Georgia Tech, this area has the “highest density of startups, corporate innovators, and academic researchers in the entire southeastern United States. “ By locating there, the company had access to many useful resources much needed by a start-up company.

Further help came from the Georgia Centers of Innovation, which is a division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. This program has five different centers, including one focused on manufacturing and another on logistics.  It was the logistics one that offered assistance to Smart Gladiator by featuring the company in its early days at the Technology Showcases that were part of the Georgia Logistics Summit. In fact, Puga was a speaker at one of those sessions.

 “When we were rolling out our product the Center was very helpful in allowing us opportunities to present our technology,” says Puga. “Without their help, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

Today the company has expanded its capabilities. In addition to the wearables, the company now manufactures tablets, truck mounts and handheld devices. And they have a software division as well.

This growth has attracted well-known companies such as Bosch, Kohler, Komatsu and Stryker who are customers.

Growth is continuing for the company that has transferred the lesson of collaboration it learned in its early years to collaborating with customers who are often the source of new product ideas.

Read the full article here – https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21148817/innovation-lab-helps-small-manufacturers-grow

Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
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, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 50 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard and video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. 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. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com.
More articles by: Puga Sankara

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