newsworthy
Troubled transportation and logistics service provider Roadrunner Transportation
Systems Inc. said it will downsize its unprofitable dry van business by the end of
2019, reducing the company’s dry van tractor and trailer fleets by over 50% and
laying off some 10% of its total workforce.
The cuts in the business unit, which is part of the company’s truckload segment,
will include the closing of five terminals and elimination of approximately 450 jobs,
according to Downers Grove, Illinois-based Roadrunner.
The move represents Roadrunner’s latest bid to regain control after a series of
financial and management mishaps, highlighted by its 2018 release of re-stated
2016 financial results that revealed the company had lost $360 million on revenue
of $2.03 billion.
Shortly after that fiscal wreck, Roadrunner hit a technology pothole, disclosing
that hackers had compromised an employee’s email account in November 2018.
Third-party forensic investigators found that data including Social Security numbers and financial information for 78 individuals may have been exposed, although
the company says it has found no evidence that the information was misused.
Roadrunner said the cutbacks in the dry van business would allow it to focus on
more profitable segments. “The decision to downsize the dry van business is a significant step in executing our strategy to emphasize our value-added logistics and
asset-light [less-than-truckload] segments and increase our returns on invested
capital,” Roadrunner CEO Curt Stoelting said in a release.
British robotics startup Starship Technologies
will roll out its self-driving parcel-delivery
robots to 100 university campuses in the next
24 months, thanks to a $40 million infusion of
venture capital.
The Series A round brings Starship’s total
backing to $85 million and was led by
Morpheus Ventures with participation from
prior investors, including Shasta Ventures,
Matrix Partners, and MetaPlanet Holdings as
well as new investors that include TDK Ventures and Qu Ventures.
Starship had raised $17.2 million in venture capital in a 2017 round to expand
its U.S. trials. The company, which recently completed its first 100,000 commercial
deliveries, said it would use the new funding to rapidly expand its services to more
university campuses.
Students can already use the firm’s autonomous vehicles, which resemble six-wheeled electric picnic coolers, at the University of Pittsburgh and will soon see
them at Indiana’s Purdue University.
“This new investment will see Starship expand onto more campuses as we
head toward a goal of offering our services to over 1 million students,” Starship
Technologies CEO Lex Bayer said in a release. “An entire generation of university
students [is] growing up in a world where they expect to receive a delivery from a
robot after a few taps on their smartphone.”
Roadrunner slashes dry van fleet, lays off
10% of workforce
Starship Technologies to send its self-driving
delivery bots to college
Descartes Systems Group,
a software-as-a-service solutions provider, has acquired
Stepcom, a business-to-business supply chain integration network based in
Switzerland. … Germany-based material handling
company Witron has sold its
1,000th case order machine
(COM). The COM, invented
by Witron founder Walter
Winkler, was introduced in
2003 as a key component of
the company’s order-pick-ing machinery (OPM) system. … Global logistics
services provider Dachser
USA Air & Sea Logistics has
announced that Johnston
Logistics Ltd., the Irish logistics company it acquired in
2017, has been rebranded as Dachser Ireland Ltd.
and is now fully integrated
into the Dachser network.
… Automated solutions
company Swisslog has celebrated a major milestone:
Vectura, its automated
stacker crane for pallet
warehouses, has turned 50
years old. … The National
Motor Freight Traffic
Association Inc. (NMFTA)
has released v1.0 of its
Request for Proposal (RFP)
templates for use by motor
freight carriers during the
telematics-system procurement process. The RFP templates were created to help
motor carriers establish
baseline cybersecurity standards for telematics devices
connected to commercial
trucks, used by drivers of
commercial vehicles, and
integrated into fleet opera-tions/maintenance systems.
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