Procurement is the easy part. Automotive suppliers, FMCG producers, and pharma manufacturers across DACH and Southeast Asia have invested in AGV fleets over the past five years. Many of those vehicles are operating today at a fraction of their potential because the integration layer was never built. The AGV runs; the WMS does not know it ran. The MES cannot issue a transport order the vehicle will understand. The fleet management software from vendor A cannot coordinate traffic with vehicles from vendor B on the same shopfloor.

The integration challenge in autonomous intralogistics is consistently harder than the hardware procurement. It requires protocol expertise, software architecture judgment, and a clear model of how production orders, inventory movements, and transport tasks relate to one another in real time. Gradion works at this layer, connecting heterogeneous AGV fleets to the production and warehouse systems that govern material flow.

What we deliver

Multi-Vendor Fleet Management via SYNAOS

Gradion's partnership with SYNAOS provides access to an intelligent intralogistics platform built for environments where multiple AGV and AMR brands share a single shopfloor. SYNAOS has coordinated fleets of 125 or more vehicles across 100+ installations worldwide, processing over 10,000 daily transport orders. Its architecture is manufacturer-independent: any vehicle that supports the VDA 5050 interface standard can be orchestrated from one control layer, eliminating the operational fragmentation that comes from running each vendor's proprietary fleet software in parallel.

Gradion scopes, configures, and integrates the SYNAOS platform into the client's existing IT environment. Integration covers order intake from WMS or MES, real-time task dispatching to vehicles, traffic coordination on the shopfloor map, and status reporting back to production systems. The result is a single operational view of material flow rather than multiple dashboards that tell different stories.

VDA 5050 and Protocol Integration

VDA 5050 is the open interface standard for AGV and AMR communication developed by the German automotive industry. For facilities running multiple AGV brands or planning to expand automation over time, VDA 5050 compliance is the prerequisite for interoperability. Gradion implements VDA 5050 integration as part of fleet management architecture. Where vehicles support the standard natively, integration is direct. Where older vehicles require adaptation, Gradion builds the translation layer.

Route Optimization and Traffic Management

Static routing tables fail in dynamic production environments. When a production order shifts priority, a line stops for maintenance, or a batch requires materials from a different storage zone, the fleet needs to respond in real time. SYNAOS uses an event-driven optimization approach that continuously recalculates task assignment and routing based on current production state. Gradion configures traffic management for zone rules, priority queuing for time-critical transport tasks, and deadlock prevention logic for high-density shopfloor layouts.

WMS and MES Integration

Autonomous transport is only as useful as its connection to the systems that govern production and inventory. A transport order that is not triggered by a WMS goods movement, or that does not report completion back to the MES, creates reconciliation work that offsets the automation benefit. Gradion designs and implements the bidirectional integration between intralogistics platforms and production systems: production order-triggered transport requests from MES, inventory movement confirmation back to WMS on task completion, and exception handling for transport failures that need to trigger manual intervention or order rescheduling.

Simulation and Monitoring

SYNAOS includes digital twin capability for the shopfloor, and Gradion uses this environment before live deployment to validate facility layouts, identify bottleneck zones under load, and confirm that the planned vehicle count can sustain required throughput. Simulation findings regularly reshape the physical deployment plan, recovering their cost in the first weeks of live operation.

Once the fleet is running, Gradion deploys fleet dashboards that surface the metrics operations managers use: transport cycle time against target, vehicle availability by shift, queue depth by priority tier, and mean time to resolve transport exceptions before they cascade to line stoppages. Alerting integrates into existing incident management tools where they exist.

Proof in production

Schaeffler Vietnam, the regional operation of a global automotive and industrial supplier, became the first production deployment of SEER and HIK robots on the SYNAOS platform anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region. Gradion delivered the integration as a named SYNAOS implementation partner, connecting the mixed AGV fleet to Schaeffler's production environment. The project was the first SYNAOS-Gradion engagement in APAC and established the technical foundation for planned rollouts in Korea, India, and Thailand.

Senior Aerospace Thailand, a precision manufacturer producing components for aerospace, defense, and industrial OEMs, engaged Gradion to modernize its factory software ecosystem. Production data had been managed in spreadsheets, with production efficiency running at 55% against a 95% target. Gradion built the automation solutions and integrated the factory software layer that gave operations management real-time visibility into production state. Soonthorn Tharnpipitchai, Supply Chain Director: “We are very impressed by the professionalism of the Gradion team. Their work with Infor CloudSuite Industrial has streamlined our operations and improved efficiency.”

CTA

Describe the intralogistics setup: fleet size, vehicle brands, facility layout, and the production systems the fleet needs to connect to. Gradion will scope the automation architecture.