Alliances linked to lift trucks both logical and logistical
What do you get when you cross Mickey Mouse with Spider Man?
A heck of an exterminator bill.
Except it’s Walt Disney Co. that hopes to exterminate its competition by buying Marvel Entertainment and all its franchised heroes for $4 billion. Disney is betting that this investment will send it soaring above the Entertainment Industry’s box office ground wars.
The strategy behind this deal is nothing new to the industrial truck industry. The titans in it have been merging and acquiring each other’s brand-name stars for the last few years. The distribution pairings of Jungheinrich and Mitsubishi Caterpillar and Hyster and Yale brands are the most recent superheroic announcements.
I wouldn’t be mentioning the Disney deal here if other brand-name combos with materials handling implications hadn’t made the news in the same week. For example, Walmart is now offering the merchandise of smaller retailers on its website—similar to what Amazon.com does. This adds a million new items to its roster of offerings but none of the inventory handling responsibilities. All the lift trucks moving those items, as well as the distribution centers in which they’ll be moving them, will belong to the retailers with whom Walmart is partnering. Walmart won’t have to lift a fork.
Another interesting set of partnerships was announced in the world of food retailing. Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. will be investing the $1 million it received as a grant from the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority (PEDA) to convert from electric pallet jacks and reach trucks to hydrogen fuel-cell-powered vehicles at its Pottsville, Pennsylvania retail service center. The grant will offset a portion of the costs associated with the installation of an on-site hydrogen infrastructure, which includes an outdoor hydrogen storage tank and indoor fueling dispensers.
By November of 2009 the produce facility at this site will be serviced by all hydrogen vehicles. Wegmans will use 50 Crown pallet trucks and 9 Crown class-2 stand-up reach trucks from Lift Inc, Lancaster Pennsylvania. Lift Inc. will also install Plug Power’s GenDrive™ fuel cell power packs into the vehicles. Then, throughout 2011 and 2012, Wegmans plans to expand its use of hydrogen fuel cell technology at the Pottsville facility.
But wait—there’s more! GENCO Supply Chain Solutions is the one purchasing the 136 GenDrive™ fuel cell power units Wegmans will be using. Like Wegmans, GENCO is using grant money–part of a $6.1 million award it received in April from the US Department of Energy (DOE) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
"Due to economic conditions a number of our customers had put their fuel cell projects on hold, so we were looking for a company that could take advantage of our award in converting their fleet," says Bob Simon, program manager and Six Sigma Master Black Belt at GENCO. "We are looking for more partners to take advantage of our DOE award. We have customers who have been on the fence about hydrogen, so we’re hoping this project will sway them in that direction."
The projects that come out of GENCO’s award will represent Class 1, 2, and 3 lift trucks. Simon believes that variety of equipment will result in case studies that will help early adopters get comfortable with the numbers and analytics surrounding fuel cells.
These new alliances in the logistics world may not excite comic book fans, but the lessons learned will some day make the supply chains handling their super-hero cereal and chotchkies a lot more powerful.
Tom Andel
Cheap Groceries commented:
