DC Velocity - December 2011

Heavy, heavy hippos

How do you pick up a hippopotamus? Ve-e-e-ry carefully … and with a heavy-duty counterbalanced forklift.

Transporting live animals is both an art and a science, and it’s never easy. Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Zoo faced an especially daunting challenge when it had to move Cindy and Unna, two hippos weighing about two tons each, to a new home elsewhere in the zoo. Although the animals only moved a short distance, zookeepers said, it took nine months to prepare for the two-hour operation, and the process to transport them was the same as if they had moved to another city.

The hippos were transferred in a crate measuring 15 feet long by 5 feet wide by 7 feet high. Once each was comfortably ensconced inside the container, a 17,500-pound-capacity Toyota forklift provided by United Rentals loaded the crate onto a flatbed, which then drove out onto the street and back to the zoo through another entrance. The forklift driver then unloaded the crate and positioned it inside the animals’ new enclosure, which features a large outdoor area and a pool. Hippos, zookeepers, and forklift reportedly are doing fine.

To watch the zoo’s video of the delicate move, go to http://youtu.be/tVSq2gNE_Yw. ;

Grab those low-hanging kilowatts

When distribution centers begin working to reduce energy consumption, one of the first areas they look at is lighting.

Take Wal-Mart Stores, for example. At the Dematic-sponsored Material Handling & Logistics Conference in Park City, Utah, in September, Jeff Smith, senior director of logistics, maintenance, and purchasing for Walmart, detailed some of the steps his company has taken at its DCs to reduce energy use.

Over four years, Walmart retrofitted the lighting in over 100 DCs, cutting annual electricity use by 1. 9 million kilowatt-hours and yielding average savings of $124,300 per facility per year.

Now, Walmart is making a further attack on DC lighting costs. In 2010, the retailer began testing LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in high-bay locations in its distribution centers. It replaced the fluorescent lighting in two DCs with LEDs this year. Smith said that if those tests prove successful, Walmart would launch another four-year project to install LED fixtures in all of its DCs.

Another company that can boast similar successes is the industrial distributor W.W. Grainger. In a separate presentation at the conference, Patrick Shurtliff, Grainger’s senior manager, property management, said his company upgraded lighting in 16 facilities last year and expects to complete another 36 this year. It also installed a 9,600-panel photovoltaic system on the roof of a New Jersey DC. Shurtliff said he expects a payback on the project in four years, thanks in part to a grant under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that paid for 30 percent of the project. ;

inbound

Freight, football, and the
Farrelly Brothers

Logistics and transportation conferences generally are staid affairs. But occasionally there are moments of levity, as attendees at the Coalition of New England Companies for Trade’s (CONECT) 10th Annual Northeast Cargo Symposium can attest.

The first sign that the Nov. 3 event would be no ordinary meeting was the venue: a private club at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., with a view of the New England Patriots’ home field. The second sign: the keynote speaker was Dan Kraft, CEO of International Forest Products (IFP), the original business of Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his family.

The younger Kraft described IFP’s global operations, noting that it markets its products in more than 80 countries and sources in more than 30. Then, he explained IFP’s shipping volumes in novel terms. One ton, he noted, is equivalent to “ 6. 8 Vince Wilforks” (the Patriots’ 325-pound defensive tackle); IFP ships “the equivalent of 14 million Vince Wilforks of pulp and paper annually, or 22 million Wes Welkers” (the considerably lighter-weight and top-cal-iber wide receiver).

Football wasn’t the only entertaining subject raised at the conference. CONECT honored Anne Neary, the soon-to-retire import manager for the retailer Christmas Tree Shops, with a “Person of the Year” award.

What’s so funny about that? Neary’s nephews, it turns out, are Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the producers of such comedies as “There’s Something About Mary” and the upcoming “Three Stooges” film. Unbeknownst to her, the brothers had filmed a “Two-Minute Tribute to Aunt Anne” for the awards ceremony.

The video was rife with jokes, including some international trade-related humor. First, the brothers suggested that the ocean carrier United States Lines’ 1986 bankruptcy filing occurred suspiciously soon after Neary helped one of them get a job there. They also said they were surprised that during their “drug-running days,” Aunt Anne never questioned why they wanted to add a few “bales of hay” to her containers of giftware from the Far East.