inbound
In warehouses and manufacturing plants, it’s not
unusual for pallet jacks,
trailers, and other pieces of
material handling equipment—in short, anything
with wheels—to go missing. It’s also not unusual to
find them (eventually) in
another department or even
another building.
But can you be sure that
the parts trailer or pallet
jack you recovered is really
yours—especially if they all
look the same?
Hamilton Caster solved
that problem for one of its
customers. The steer trailers
Hamilton custom-builds for
the client, which uses them
in a manufacturing plant to
transport raw materials and
finished parts, used to regularly disappear. Most of the
time, it turned out they’d
been “poached” by another department. To keep the
in-demand trailers where
they belong, Hamilton
came up with a simple but
effective solution: paint the
carts red, blue, green, or
yellow—a different color
for each department—so
employees know where a
trailer “lives.” According
to Hamilton, missing trailer reports have declined by
100 percent since the carts
got their new look.
Companies in logistics, warehousing, and material handling gave generously of
their time and money over the past few weeks. Here are some examples:
b The Inmar Foundation’s collaborative venture with the Girl Scouts’ Peaks
to Piedmont Council in North Carolina has received grants from NASA and
Qualcomm. The grants will help fund the Piedmont Triad area’s first-ever all-girl
team to participate in the NC First robotics competition in North Carolina.
b InfinityQS International pledged to donate $2 million to St. Jude Children’s
Research Hospital over the next 10 years. St. Jude has named a gathering space in
the Marlo Thomas Center for Global Education and Collaboration to commemo-
rate the company’s support for the hospital, which serves chronically ill children
and their families at no cost.
b The East Texas Foodbank received a $1,600 donation from employees of
Capacity Trucks, who purchased raffle tickets for a chance to dump a bucket of ice
water over participating managers. The company’s CEO also made a donation to
the ALS Association.
b Load Delivered Logistics challenged other Chicago-area logistics companies
to participate in Meals Delivered, a competition to raise donations for the Greater
Chicago Food Depository. The two-week competition exceeded its goal, raising
funds for 12,923 meals.
Good deeds
Color coding
keeps trailers
from going
AWOL
Because it will be handling the world’s largest containerships, APM Terminals’ brand-new Maasvlakte II container terminal in
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, was designed
for efficiency. Every task that could possibly
be done without human intervention has
been automated. The terminal includes eight
remote-controlled ship-to-shore cranes—
the first in the world to be operated without anyone in the cab. The cranes place
containers on “lift automatic guided vehicles,” which travel from the dock to the
container yard using an onboard navigation system that follows a transponder grid.
(Similar technology is in place at Hamburg’s Altenwerder Container Terminal.)
Once the containers arrive at their destination, the AGVs deposit them into storage
racks. Later, automated rail-mounted gantry cranes move the containers from the
racks to the rail terminal, to a waiting truck, or to another area of the yard as needed.
The terminal, which opened to landside intermodal business in November and
will be fully open for maritime business in February, has another claim to fame:
APM says Maasvlakte II is the only container terminal in the world that produces
zero emissions on site. Because its entire fleet of ship-to-shore, on-dock, and yard
cranes; AGVs; and personnel transport vehicles are battery-powered, the company
says, the terminal will produce no carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, or particulate
emissions.
As if the operation weren’t “green” enough, as of Jan. 1, 100 percent of Maasvlakte
II’s electricity needs are being supplied by wind power. Under a two-year contract,
Amsterdam-based NV Nuon Energy will provide electricity generated by offshore
and onshore wind farms in Europe.
Highly automated and deeply green
