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Robotic Small Package
Singulation (SPS)
Creating order from chaos
Traditionally, inducting packages or items
to a sortation system has been a manual
operation. It’s dull, repetitive and hard to
find people to do it. That is now changing.
ABB, together with a leading perception
company, has developed a robot-centric
solution that accurately and consistently
identifies each package, picking and placing
it on the induction conveyor, every hour
of every day. Creating order from chaos
one package at a time. It is just one of the
new robotic solutions for the warehousing,
distribution and order fulfillment market
from ABB. www.abb.com/robotics
billion in its network since 2000. As with
most Class I railroads, domestic intermodal “remains one of our largest growth
opportunities,” he says.
To remain competitive, BNSF “must
continue to be a technology leader by
exploring and adopting emerging technologies,” Williams added, noting that
the railroad already is benefiting from the
Rail-Pass app (which allows truckers to
submit cargo information prior to arrival) and automated gate systems to speed
up the movement of rail containers and
trailers. It’s also pilot-testing automated
horizontal container-movement technology in Kansas and a battery-electric road
locomotive in Southern California. BNSF
Railway has 42,000 employees, 32,500
miles of track in 28 states, and more than
8,000 locomotives.
Among the most closely watched—and
talked about—initiatives in the intermodal rail market has been the rollout of PSR
and concerns over how the new operating
philosophy would impact capacity and
service. “I was always a bit of a skeptic in
the past” about PSR, admits Hub Group’s
Yeager, who counts Union Pacific (UP)
and Norfolk Southern (NS) among his
company’s rail partners.
But as these new operating plans have
been aggressively implemented and
refined, the skeptic has turned believ-
er. “UP and NS have gone about it in a
very methodical way,” Yeager observes.
“On-time service of the domestic product
at Norfolk Southern is as good as it has
ever been.” He added that Union Pacific
“has improved [service] well over 1,000
basis points since January.”
What’s the tipping point that drives
the decision for shippers and their IMCs
or brokers to choose rail intermodal ver-
sus over-the-road truck, or vice versa?
“Logistically, there is no more efficient
way to move long-haul shipments than
by rail,” emphasizes BNSF’s Williams.
“Our trucking partners work in tandem
with us to finish the final miles … to the
customer’s door.”
To some extent, Mark D’Amico, senior
analyst with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-
based S.J. Consulting Group, agrees. “Rail
gets more competitive in the longer-haul
[transcontinental] lanes compared with
shorter haul,” he says. “With short
haul, the spread between transit
times and rates is less attractive.”
D’Amico also cites as revealing a
third-party industry metric that
calculates the spread between spot
intermodal and spot over-the-road
truckload (TL) rates over time.
“In 2015, the value of this metric
implied that the average intermodal
savings was 20.1% versus truckload.
Comparatively, in the July 2018–
to–June 2019 period, that average
savings had dropped to 3%, which
sheds some color on the shift from
TL to intermodal,” he notes.
