Expert Q&A: Greg Meyne, Vice President of Consulting, Automation & Robotics, enVista

Warehouse operators can’t find enough workers to pick, pack and ship orders. Meanwhile, customers expect delivery within 48 hours. Greg Meyne, Vice President of Consulting, Automation & Robotics at enVista, brings unique insights into how strategic technology partnerships can transform these operational challenges into competitive advantages. Through enVista’s collaboration with GreyOrange and innovative solutions like enMotion, Greg’s team is pioneering approaches that don’t just automate processes — they amplify human productivity while delivering the flexibility modern operations demand.

1. Can you tell us about enVista and your role within the company? 

enVista is the premier provider of supply chain technology & strategy services, automation and robotics, Microsoft solutions, and IT managed services. My role as VP within CAR is leading a team that analyzes data and designs automation and robotic systems for greenfield and brownfield opportunities. My team supports sales and then transitions those designs to our implementation teams, where we implement the design solution, applying a variety of MHE.

2. What are some of the key challenges that retailers and logistics providers are facing today? 

Most of the challenges that we are seeing within our client opportunities center around two pain points: 

1) availability of labor to support picking, packing and shipping operations within their facilities 

and

2) meeting their customers’ delivery/service level agreement needs (expecting delivery within 48 hours). 

Each of these pain points can lead to opportunities to apply automation and robotics within their operations. The need to constantly improve productivity among their associates is an ongoing challenge for them, which enVista is uniquely positioned to help solve. 

3. What steps can they take to boost efficiency and drive more value from their automation investments? 

When we analyze data and use that to design automation solutions, we focus on how the solution will boost the efficiency of the associates. Our other focus is to provide flexibility within the solution. We want machines capable of doing multiple functions within the facility; we want software to align with operations so we can move labor to the areas needing it most, thus boosting associate efficiency. The combined machine and software solution is designed to maximize efficiency throughout the facility.

 4. Tell us about your new case pick automation solution. 

enMotion is a new product for enVista that uses an AMR to move an order pallet (or cage) to a location for an associate to pick a full case to fulfill orders. The AMR allows the associate to stay in a pick zone while the AMR does the travel, allowing the associate to pick at a much higher case rate. We are partnering with GreyOrange on the orchestration software for enMotion. This is another way, another solution, that we can design for our clients.

5. There’s a lot of buzz around AI-driven optimization these days. What are some of the key benefits you’ve seen in that area? 

Machine learning keeps advancing efficiencies within operations. Being able to predict what is coming, aligning those predictions to minimize machine movement, slotting, forecasting labor, etc., are all driving increased efficiencies. Customer demands are only increasing. Systems need to be flexible enough to adapt to those increasing demands and AI optimization attempts to keep up with those demands.                  

6. enVista is a GreyOrange partner. What is the core value of that partnership (and of GreyMatter) for your team? 

We are very excited about our partnership with GreyOrange. The GreyMatter software platform allows us a level of operational control, along with machine control, within a design that we haven’t had before. It expands our offering to a client and adds another tool in our toolbox that we haven’t had. Being able to use a central control software over various AMR solutions is a major addition to our solution designs.

Having GreyMatter orchestrate the entire building, multiple MHE components, and associate movement under a single platform is a tremendous advantage when designing automation. GreyMatter eliminates the need for multiple software platforms within multiple MHE components needing to communicate with each other for the system to work as a whole, which is the design intention.