Mantis Informatics embraces the future of warehousing with EBRD and EU support 

“An image is worth a thousand words” most accurately describes Mantis Informatics SA’s flagship product, the Logistics Vision Suite (LVS), which employs smart glasses in a novel way. Established in Greece in 1996, the firm has developed an innovative product to support companies with the management of their warehouses with help from the EBRD and the European Union.

Mantis is a leading vendor of software and solutions for warehouse management systems (WMS) and logistics. The company now has nine offices and many qualified partners, being present in 30 countries across Europe and Asia. It recently acquired Insight GT, Inc., a leading international slotting and warehouse optimisation software solutions vendor establishing its presence in North America.

The company’s flagship product is the LVS, which is the only highly scalable ‘self-service’ logistics platform in the world. It enables Mantis’s 16,000 concurrent users to easily configure, deploy and support their warehouse management systems by themselves, responding quickly to their continuously evolving needs.

LVS goes well beyond the management of the warehouse, offering extended capabilities for value-added services, including light manufacturing, dock and gate management, parcel management, centralised control of remote warehouses, inventory optimisation and comprehensive traceability management.

In its efforts to always innovate and offer additional value to its customers, Mantis requested the EBRD’s support in order to develop a new solution using smart glasses.

Augmented reality (AR) smart glasses are eyewear equipped with technology to merge what one sees in the real world with virtual information and can be combined with advanced speech recognition.

As part of the Bank’s advisory programme for small and medium-sized enterprises, funded by the EU through the European Investment Advisory Hub (EIAH) of the European Investment Bank, Optilog Advisory Services, an experienced logistics consultant, helped Mantis with this new solution.

Optilog helped Mantis develop the new vision picking solution for warehouses by defining the necessary parameters, comparing it with similar systems, creating specialist labs, testing and analysing the results.

AR-assisted tasks such as vision picking with smart glasses are the future of warehousing, and have proved particularly vital in coping with the Covid-19 crisis and its consequences. This has now been made possible thanks to the combination of ergonomic equipment with the vision picking application designed in-house by Mantis.

The EBRD launched the Advice for Small Businesses programme in Greece in March 2018. Since then, more than 90 companies have benefited from advisory support through its network of consultants and advisors.