News and Trends in Materials Handling
By Corinne Kator, Associate Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 4/1/2008
Personnel: Meet our new publishing director
Modern Materials Handling is proud to welcome Christopher Platt as its publishing director. Platt also heads up Modern's sister publications in the supply chain group at Reed Business Information: Material Handling Product News, Logistics Management and Supply Chain Management Review.
Platt is rejoining Reed Business Information after spending the last two years with PennWell Corp., where he was group publisher for Solid State Technology & Advanced Packaging and, before that, associate publisher of Small Times. During his first tenure at Reed, Platt was associate publisher of Electronic Business and Electronic News.
Acquisition: CHEP buys LeanLogistics
Pallet and container pooling company CHEP acquired supply chain software provider LeanLogistics last month for $45 million.
Based in Holland, Mich., LeanLogistics provides on-demand transportation management systems (TMS) for more than 40 major corporations.
According to CHEP senior vice president Brian Beattie, CHEP and its parent company, Brambles, worked with LeanLogistics on getting this acquisition locked in for several months. Their ultimate plan is to use extensive data gathered by CHEP to benefit TMS customers.
“We see an opportunity to leverage cross-customer supply chain data, which CHEP captures from its pooling business, to help customers reduce transportation costs,” Beattie says. “We will be working closely with the LeanLogistics team to test the services and then roll out further once we validate the savings.”
LeanLogistics president and CEO Dan Dershem says leveraging this data will result in services that customers can use to drive supply chain efficiencies.
“As diesel prices rise, all parties to the shipment face the need to improve efficiency to offset the cost increases,” Dershem says. “A key source of efficiency may come from managing the overall process more efficiently with information. There is an extremely small number of sources with the critical mass of these data. The combination of CHEP and LeanLogistics creates the largest, most viable source of this information.”
LeanLogistics will operate as a division of CHEP, and the company will remain in Holland, Mich.
People to Know and Company News
The electric drives and controls technology group of Bosch Rexroth Corp. named Ted Thayer PLC and HMI product manager…William Kiel passed ownership of Carron Net Company to his son William Kiel, Jr., and son-in-law Troy Christiansen…Mark Dressel and Emma Shin joined the systems sales team at Diamond Phoenix…Andrew Breckenridge was promoted to president of supply chain consulting firm Forte…Bruce DeMent, president of Kastalon, was inducted into the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame…Nolan Day joined Lyon Workspace Products as senior director for marketing…Ozburn-Hessey Logistics hired Mark Holmes as vice president for global integrated solutions…Safety Today appointed Robert Cowling head of national account business development…Wolfgang Partsch joined Tompkins Associates as senior vice president of global supply chain services for Europe…TriFactor promoted Richard Gillespie to engineering manager.
Alien Technology signed an expanded RFID reseller agreement with SATO America… AMETEK acquired the Motion Control Group…The Beacon Group purchased 3PL List Logistics & Distribution…PowerID formed a strategic partnership with STMicroelectronics to develop battery-assisted, passive RFID technology…Rockwell Automation bought the safety and automation business unit of CEDES AG…Illinois-based Shorr Packaging joined the Lantech distributor network…SICK and VITRONIC signed a partnership agreement for marketing their camera systems in the United States…TAGSYS signed a technology partnership with Sirit…Wesley International formed an alliance with FastFetch to market the company's multimodal order picking system.
AGVs applying for healthcare duty
Among the items on the research agenda being discussed by the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA, www.mhia.org) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, www.nist.gov) is a major overhaul of the standard for automatic guided vehicles (AGVs).
An expanded standard is needed, says MHIA's Dick Ward, because AGVs are beginning to be used outside traditional materials handling settings. The healthcare industry, for example, is examining ways it might use AGVs to improve patient care.
NIST's Roger Bostelman studies patient lift and transfer devices. He and colleagues have developed prototypes of a HLPR chair (home lift, position and rehabilitation chair) based on forklift and AGV technology.
“We heard from the medical device industry that the most difficult thing is to put patients on and off toilets with dignity due to confined spaces,” Bostelman says. “We're targeting that as our intelligent patient transfer application.”
Bioengineering students at Florida Gulf Coast University are now helping to perfect the HLPR chair prototypes.
“The students are looking at making the system more automated and more robotic so the system can navigate itself through a healthcare environment,” says Professor Jim Sweeney. “We're starting with a system that can be controlled by an operator or someone else who operates it for them. We want to push the system forward into a next generation system that is more automated.”
Discussions about updating the AGV standard to accommodate vehicles like the HLPR chair will continue in Cleveland this month at MHIA's trade show, NA 2008.
Events: Get lean and green
Eliminating waste is the goal of lean manufacturing initiatives. It is also the goal of many environmental initiatives.
Pamela Gordon, author of the book “Lean and Green” and a speaker at the recent Scope East supply chain conference, believes today's dual emphasis on productivity and environmental sustainability will soon lead companies to drive huge amounts of waste out of their products and processes.
“Ten years from now,” she says, “we're going to look back at how we ran our business and say 'What were we thinking? All of that waste!'”
Fellow conference speaker Jack Ampuja, a consultant (www.supplychainoptimizers.com) and a professor at Niagara University, says using inefficient secondary packaging is a source of incredible waste. Most companies, he says, ignore the impact carton sizes have on warehousing and transportation and end up stacking too few cartons on their pallets.
After rigorous analysis, Ampuja says, one of his clients reduced its carton length by 0.25 inches, width by 0.375 inches and height by 1.125 inches. The results of these minor adjustments were significant:
- 10% savings in corrugated
- 20% more cases per pallet
- 21% more cases per trailer
- a total cost reduction of 17%
Choosing the right shipping cartons is a big task. “Start by getting together all the people who have an oar in the water,” Ampuja says. A carton discussion, he suggests, should include representatives from procurement, marketing, manufacturing and logistics.
Another way companies can eliminate waste, says conference speaker Myles Cohen of Sonoco Recycling, is by diverting materials from the landfill.
Much of what companies pay to throw away, he says, can actually earn them money. A waste audit at one Sonoco customer, he says, showed 65% of what the customer habitually sent to the landfill was actually recyclable. The company used to pay $230,000 in yearly landfill fees; today it earns $325,000 per year in recycling revenue—and keeps valuable materials out of the landfill.
Turning waste streams to revenue streams, says Cohen, is an excellent way to make a company both leaner and greener.
View All Blogs
