DC Velocity - February 2020

INBOUND

Here’s our monthly roundup of some of the charitable works and donations by companies in the material handling and logistics space.

b What started as a small group of C.H. Robinson employees has turned into the largest corporate team at the annual JDRF Minnesota One Walk event, a fundraiser for type 1 diabetes (T1D) research. Now, more than 700 employees and their family members and friends come together each February to raise money for research, advocacy, and patient support for those living with T1D. This year, third-party logistics service provider C.H. Robinson is celebrating its 20th anniversary of supporting JDRF’s One Walk and will be the first corporate fundraising team to reach the $1 million mark. Across the company, 16 teams, led by employee captains, compete to see who can raise the most money.

b Transervice Logistics Inc., a customized transportation solutions provider, launched a “food fight” between its Lake Success, New York, corporate office and Des Plaines, Illinois, Midwest regional office to collect food for the needy. The drive collected 2,085 pounds of food for Move for Hunger, a nonprofit that works with relocation companies to collect nonperishable food items and deliver them to food banks across North America. The company’s donation provided a total of 1,740 meals.

b In its third year supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, supply chain solutions provider AIT Worldwide Logistics brought together 27 fundraising teams, which collectively raised $31,229 for the cause. With the company’s promise to match the first $30,000 raised, AIT’s total 2019 donation reached $61,229—more than double its initial $30,000 goal. n

Logistics gives back
Trial by fire

The challenge of balancing safety with efficiency touches every part of the global supply chain.

Nowhere is that more true than in airport operations, where planes loaded with combustible jet fuel must comply with a long list of regulatory requirements to protect pilots, passengers, and the environment.

The industry’s safety efforts took a big step forward in January, when the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it had completed construction on a $5 million 2,500-square-foot research facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The site will be used for conducting performance tests of new fire-extinguishing agents that could one day replace aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), a fluorine-based compound that’s very effective at extinguishing jet fuel fires but poses an array of environmental and health threats.

According to the FAA, Congress directed the agency in 2018 to stop requiring the use of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in aircraft firefighting foams within three years. However, fluorine-free foams on the market today do not match the performance of their fluorinated counterparts, the agency says.

So researchers are now using the new facility to conduct performance tests of
potential replacement fire-extinguishing agents. The fully enclosed fire-test facility
is designed to eliminate weather-related variables in testing, enhance data-collec-
tion capabilities, and contain the byproducts of fire-testing chemicals to prevent
groundwater contamination, the agency says. n
Warehouse automation may
not be the most glamorous of
fields, and its luminaries will
likely never receive widespread
acclaim. So the news that three
innovators in the sector received
some national recognition last
month seemed worthy of note.

In January, the National
Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF)
announced its 2020 induct-
ees—a group of 22 innovators
whose inventions range from
the hard hat to the sports bra to
(wait for it) mobile robots for
order fulfillment. The inventors
honored for their work in mobile
robotics were Mick Mountz,
Peter Wurman, and Raffaello
D’Andreas, the co-founders
of Kiva Systems, a company
known for its pioneering work
in goods-to-person order ful-
fillment. In a release, NIHF
described the Kiva technology
as “a revolutionary warehouse
order-fulfillment system that
uses mobile robots and con-
trol software to bring inventory
shelves to workers, dramatically
improving all aspects of fulfill-
ment operations.”
Kiva Systems was acquired
in 2012 by e-commerce giant
Amazon.com Inc., which
promptly took the robot-
ic technology private (and
later rebranded it as Amazon
Robotics). Although it no lon-
ger exists as a separate compa-
ny, Kiva’s pioneering approach
inspired many other tech start-
ups to launch their own robotic
fulfillment systems, creating a
whole new logistics tech market
sector.