Georgia-Pacific, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of tissue, pulp, packaging and building products, will open its first innovation center in Tech Square next month.
To be called Point A Center for Supply Chain Innovation, the center will focus on supply chain challenges and solutions and open in a 15,000-square-foot office space in TechSquare Labs in Midtown. Georgia-Pacific is the most recent among a growing list of large companies opening innovation centers in the area. More than a dozen corporations have opened innovation centers in the state or partnered with the school.
During the course of the year, Georgia-Pacific will build out a 23,000-square-foot space inside its downtown Atlanta headquarters at 133 Peachtree Street and move the innovation center once it's completed in 2019. In addition, the company plans to utilize a 30,000-square-foot warehouse for off-site experimentation and lab work.
Kevin Heath, senior vice president and chief procurement officer at Georgia-Pacific, will head the initiative. Heath said the company will invest between $5 million and $7 million into Point A and the first partners with the center include Chick-fil-A, Delta Air Lines, Genuine Parts Co., Grainger, Rockwell Automation, Siemens and Georgia-Pacific’s parent company, Koch Industries.
“Our goal is to have a long pipeline of use cases and projects in the innovation center. And I think one of the things we’re excited about in our innovation center is its focal point on solving problems through collaboration” he said.
Point A plans to explore robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning and autonomous vehicles in order to answer some of the industry’s challenges, Heath said.
“We’re excited about being able to provide augmented and virtual reality across our 175 locations to help them solve problems quicker,” he said. “Often times we’re in a mindset where we use traditional methods and approaches to solve problems. And if we need help that’s not sitting at one of our locations, we historically would have them fly in on planes and be face-to-face to troubleshoot. We see now more real-time problem-solving, troubleshooting, education, that we can bring to our workforce to help us operate more effectively, more efficiently, more safely, more reliably and making higher-quality products for our customers.”
Mike Orr, senior vice president of operations and logistics at Genuine Parts Co., said his company is partnering with Georgia-Pacific on Point A to explore industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. He said his organization is excited to work closely with other companies within the innovation center not only on research but on short-term tech-oriented solutions for logistical problems.
“The pace of change in supply change is so tremendous that innovation is an important part of our business,” he said. “We need to have a partner to help us with our partner supply chain. And we were thrilled that Georgia-Pacific asked us to be part of the innovation center.”
Georgia-Pacific will continue to search for partners before the grand opening of Point A in June, Heath said. His team is looking for partners who are committed to the innovation center’s culture of rapid experimentation and proof of concept.
“We want to bring partners in that have competitively advantaged capabilities or products inside their organization so that we can...more evenly distribute that across the world and across the members so that they can take advantage of all the technology and innovation that’s out there,” he said.
