Honeywell’s unified approach to customers explained

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared in the Straight Talk newsletter on March 23. To sign up for the weekly newsletter and receive news like this before others, click here.

Earlier this year, Honeywell announced that its board of directors had approved the separation of its Automation and Aerospace Technologies business units, along with a previously announced plan to spin off its Advanced Materials business, into three distinct, publicly traded companies. The separation is expected to be completed in the second half of 2026.

A unified approach

Many customers of Honeywell are familiar with its Intelligrated and PSS businesses. They will be part of the Automation business. Honeywell Automation will include a portfolio of technologies, solutions and software with revenues exceeding $18 billion.

“Building on decades of innovation as its heritage, Honeywell Automation will create the buildings and industrial infrastructure of the future, leveraging process technology, software, and AI-enabled, autonomous solutions to drive the next generation of productivity, sustainability and safety for our customers,” Vimal Kapur, chairman and CEO of Honeywell, said in a release announcing the split in February. “As a standalone company with a simplified operating structure and enhanced focus, Honeywell Automation will be better able to capitalize on the global megatrends underpinning its business, from energy security and sustainability to digitalization and artificial intelligence.”

The questions for customers of its Industrial Automation and Building Automation business units are what does that mean, and how will they benefit? Supply Chain Management Review had the chance to speak with David Barker, president of Productivity Solutions and Services (PSS), and Matthew Sterner, global customer marketing leader-transportation, logistics and warehousing, at the recent ProMat show in Chicago on how a unified Honeywell is positioning itself for its customers moving forward.

Even before the formal combination of the businesses, Barker says the units worked together, but a more formal approach would offer closer collaboration and a more unified approach for customers. The new structure will provide a more streamlined point of contact, connecting customers to all the end-to-end solutions Honeywell has available, even if they choose not to access all the solutions initially, he says.

“It’s just the deepening of the strategy,” Barker notes. “We have worked together quite often. … [it’s] how we understand the customer’s needs and what problems to solve. We call it VOC—our voice of the customer—when we walk around the customer site to understand their needs.”

Previously, where customers worked separately with the appropriate Honeywell units, now they have access to the entire suite of options from the get-go, allowing for a joint problem-solving approach that may lead to better outcomes, Barker says.

Trends in automation

While warehouse automation is growing, there is still a long way to go for many. Sterner says more customers are looking at automation as a way to address labor challenges.

“The majority of warehouse processes are still manual in nature, right?” he points out. “It’s manual labor; it’s a manual process. It requires people and if you’ve got a shortage of people, you’ve got to find some other way to offset that, mitigate some of that risk.”

Barker notes that 70% of logistics and supply chain professionals surveyed said their companies were targeting over $100 million in automation investments over the next five years. “They see what it is, they see the benefits and the value. Then it’s more or less how do they implement that. How do they do it efficiently and effectively. How can they do it so that it’s also flexible,” he says.

Sterner notes that the perception of an automated warehouse is often wrong. “A lot of people think about automation and of it being a full dark warehouse with just robots and machines running around, but there’s a continuum,” he explains. “You’ve got some customers that have zero automation. You’ve got some that are trying to get to 100%, but most people fall somewhere in the middle. The flexibility is what’s important because you want to be able to make modifications to your warehouse design and layout and processes and workflows as your business changes.”

Growth under new business format

That modification Sterner mentions as business needs grow and change is one of the reasons Barker believes the more unified approach of Honeywell moving forward is a good approach for its customers.

“So industrial automation through PSS and Intelligrated, and then building automation with the control of the warehouse—from comfort levels to security to access—all of that is now together. We like to think this is a pretty unique setup. I don’t think there’s any company in this industry that actually offers all three together,” Barker says. “The good thing for us is that we show the convergence of these technologies in a control center that manages everything, and that’s unique.

“But there are different entry points for customers,” he adds. “Some don’t look at this and say, ‘Well, in six months, or two years or five years, I’m going to get there.’ Instead, they come to us with specific automation problems they’re trying to solve now. They might start by working with any one of our business units, solving those immediate challenges, and then migrate up the path, knowing that ultimately, they can reach full automation convergence within their warehouse. That scalability is what makes this approach unique.”

It is an approach that the unified business structure and closer collaboration between the business units is designed to facilitate. As an example of this, Barker points to a new dashboard that pulls relevant information from each of the units, whether it is handheld devices or automation data, and funnels that real-time informaiton to a control center so managers, from the C-suite to those on the warehouse floor, can see what is working, where issues may be occuring, and what the status of all operations are in real time.

That data stream is another part of the more cohesive, comprehensive approach Honeywell is driving toward as it seeks to evolve the customer experience.

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