An early failed RFID experiment wasn't enough to shake Patrick Sweeney's faith in the technology. In fact, he made RFID the focus of his second venture as well as his first book, RFID for Dummies .
Mitch Mac Donald has more than 30 years of experience in both the newspaper and magazine businesses. He has covered the logistics and supply chain fields since 1988. Twice named one of the Top 10 Business Journalists in the U.S., he has served in a multitude of editorial and publishing roles. The leading force behind the launch of Supply Chain Management Review, he was that brand's founding publisher and editorial director from 1997 to 2000. Additionally, he has served as news editor, chief editor, publisher and editorial director of Logistics Management, as well as publisher of Modern Materials Handling. Mitch is also the president and CEO of Agile Business Media, LLC, the parent company of DC VELOCITY and CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly.
A more conventional business executive might have written RFID off altogether after his early experiments with the technology fizzled. But Patrick Sweeney wasn't so easily dissuaded. As he saw it, the failure had less to do with the technology's capability than with its maturity. "It turned out that the technology wasn't ready—it was too expensive for what we wanted to do," he says. "Still, I felt convinced that would change. The RFID concept seemed sound. It just needed further time in development." Sweeney decided to bide his time.
Then fate intervened in the form of a fortuitous meeting on the links with a Wal-Mart executive who happened to be an early champion of radio-frequency identification. Sweeney came away convinced that there was a future in the technology. He decided to take a chance and invested his own money in a startup based on, you guessed it, RFID.
Today, Sweeney is president and CEO of ODIN Technologies, the company he founded in 2002 after recruiting Dr. Daniel Engels, the creator of the electronic product code (EPC) protocol and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Auto-ID lab. In just five years, ODIN, which specializes in the development and implementation of RFID systems for logistics applications, has become the dominant player in the physics of RFID deployment, research, and installation optimization software. Its clients range from Fortune 500 leaders to the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Logistics Agency, which in May 2006 awarded ODIN a contract to deploy the largest RFID network ever opened to public bidding.
Sweeney isn't just an entrepreneur, however. He has also proved to be something of a technology visionary. He recently had two patents approved and has several other patents in various stages of the approval process. In addition, Sweeney is the author of two RFID-related publications, RFID for Dummies and The CompTIA RFID+ Study Guide.
Sweeney spoke recently with DC VELOCITY Group Editorial Director Mitch Mac Donald about how he came to be a leading voice in the RFID field.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your background and your career to date.
A: I was born and raised in Massachusetts, and while in high school, I went to work part-time for a group of entrepreneurs up in Manchester, N.H. Then about a year and a half out of school, I had a tryout with the U.S. National Team for rowing. I spent a good five years training for the Olympics, and in 1996, I ended up finishing second in the Olympic trials. As a result, I got offered the alternate spot but didn't take it.
Q: Why not?
A: Because the alternate is the guy who sort of hopes that someone else gets hurt, gets all the gear, and then never gets to compete. I actually ended up spending that summer rowing for Ireland because I've got dual citizenship. I rowed in the World Cup with that team. After that, I wound up traveling through about 50 different countries competing in a bunch of national championships and international races. It was a great experience and it got me the "jock entry" into the top business schools around the country—or the East Coast, to be precise. I ended up going to the University of Virginia and at the same time, went to work for an IT company. I actually started my first year there as an intern and kept working through my second year.
Q: What was your first move after finishing grad school?
A: I took a full-time position with the same company.My dad was involved in the computer field starting with the technology services specialist EDS way back in 1970. I also had a lot of buddies who were starting Web site-hosting companies and making a lot of money doing it. I figured I could do that, so in 1999, I started a venture capital-backed firm offering server space for hosting. Toward the end of that year, I saw an article in MIT's Technology Review about these little chips that could track things.
Q: A report on what was then the new Auto-ID Center at MIT?
A: That's exactly right. The Auto-ID Center had just started up, so they ran an article in the magazine. As it happened, these new chips, called radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, caught my eye because they sounded like they could be used to solve a problem we were having at our managed hosting company, ServerVault.
What we were looking for at the time was a quick means of identifying the various servers in our data center. Although the servers—which were stacked in what we called a "server farm"—all looked the same, some demanded more attention than others because of their service requirements. Some of our service agreements with clients stipulated that if the server went down, we had to get a replacement server up and running within two minutes or pay a penalty. In other cases, like the server we hosted for a recipe Web site, the server could be down for 24 hours and the client didn't particularly care. Problem was, we couldn't tell them apart by simply looking at them, so I thought RFID might be an interesting application for that.
Q: Makes sense.
A: I realized we could tag every one of our servers and use the technology to quickly determine which server was which.We started using the tags to locate specific servers that needed attention. It replaced a fairly unsophisticated approach in which, essentially, whenever a problem arose, we had to go and physically touch each server and put a keyboard on it and find out what was where.
Q: So you attached RFID tags to actual server hardware and programmed the system to let you know when there was a problem with a particular server box?
A: Exactly right.
Q: How did it work out?
A: It turned out that the technology wasn't ready—it was too expensive for what we were doing. I think a lot of people have had that experience over the past four or five years.
Still, I felt convinced that would change. The RFID concept seemed sound. It just needed some further time in development. I was so convinced that in 2002, I decided to start my own RFID company.
Q: That's a fairly bold move for a guy who had tried the technology and found it still had a ways to go.
A: Actually, part of my decision stemmed from a golf trip over in Ireland, where I spent a day with Tom Coughlin, who at the time, was the president and CEO of Wal-Mart's Stores division.
Q: Sounds like this story is about to get very interesting!
A: Oh, it is. I didn't need anyone to hit me over the head with a two-by-four after I heard Tom explain why he thought RFID was a very good idea. It seemed that an opportunity had presented itself, so we got started with the formation of ODIN in 2002.
Q: What did you see your fledgling RFID company
doing?
A: One of the opportunities that we saw very early on was in what we call the physics of RFID.
Q: What do you mean by the "physics"?
A: Five years ago, a lot of what we heard about RFID in logistics applications was where and how it didn't work. People would complain, for instance, that RFID had trouble working in or near water and metal. The fact was, RFID didn't have trouble with anything. The challenge was making people understand that fact. We saw an opportunity for a company that would help people understand exactly how RF waves behave around certain materials and why. We had to help the market understand the issues of physics that related to how RFID works in various environments.
Because nobody had a really good understanding of the physics around RFID, people were struggling to make the readers work and struggling to get consistently high read rates. So that physics approach helped educate the market about the fact that RFID did work well— you just had to take various factors into consideration.
Q: What is the focus of ODIN with RFID today?
A: We design, install, and then support the actual RFID system infrastructure: the tags, the readers, the light switches, all those components. We do the design and the installation. We choose the hardware because it's very important to pick the right hardware for a particular application. We advise on the middleware, or software integrated into the system, based on the specific system's architecture.
When it comes to whose equipment or systems to use, however, we are like Switzerland. Other than making sure it is the right choice for the customer's application, we really don't care whose reader is used.We don't care whose middleware is used.We have used it all. The tools that we have are software tools that automatically configure and set up the readers once they are on site.
Q: You wrote the book RFID for Dummies about three years ago. What was it like to write a book in the "Dummies" series?
A: It was interesting on a couple of different levels. Writing the book was actually easy. The publisher of the Dummies books has really got it down to a science, and that made the work fairly simple. It was also interesting that when the book first came out, one of the things that people said was that I was giving away all the company secrets. We even had clients of ours send us proposals from other vendors that took stuff right out of the book and put it in their pitch, which is always flattering.
Essentially, I guess, we gave away all the secrets, but we also came away with the idea that we were going to continue to innovate.
It seems to be working. We focus our company on four core ideologies. Number one is to hire only the best, so we have a really extensive hiring process. Number two is to constantly innovate. Number three is to act with integrity. Number four is to create supremely satisfied clients. If you look at our list of clients, there is nobody in the RFID space that has had more success with big global clients.
Q: What do you say to the RFID naysayers who contend that the technology's capability is being oversold?
A: I'd tell them that I completely agreed for my first three and a half years in this business, but in the past year, we have very clearly seen a transition or evolution. The industry that we are leading right now is dramatically different from the one we were in just 10 months ago. As recently as July and August of 2006, there were still people over-hyping the capabilities. There were venture capitalists trying to make a quick buck. Now what we see, particularly from the beginning of this year, is that RFID has its own successful industry. The big value and the big benefit is really starting to come into clear view as we move through 2007.
Q: Does that make RFID similar to emerging technologies of the past? There's no shortage of stories about new technologies being unveiled to great fanfare before falling victim to the "over-promised and under-delivered" syndrome. And then, when the hype died down and people adjusted their expectations, the technology evolved substantively in the second round, if you will.
A: That's a very good description, and I think it is right where we are today with RFID. We are sort of in the calm after the storm, if you will. There was previously so much hype and so much noise that it created a promise for the technology that I'm not sure anyone will ever be able to deliver on.
Right now, I think we are just moving out of the evaluation process for the technology for many companies. Wal-Mart made a big push. The DOD made a big push, and others are following. For most companies, though, things move a little more deliberately. They have a little money in this year's budget. There is a little extra in next year's budget, and then in three years, there is the money to take the big step, but first they want to see if RFID proves itself in the initial small steps. If you look back, it's the same logical progression of business investment in new technologies that we've seen in the past. It happened with enterprise resource planning systems. It happened with warehouse management software(WMS). Now it's happening with RFID.
Q: What's the risk for companies that sit back and take a wait-and-see attitude toward using RFID in their supply chain operations?
A: It's the same risk folks took when they waited to see how bar coding might change the game, or how WMS might impact their business. Essentially, you run the very real risk of losing your competitive edge.Your cost of doing business is going to be substantially higher than your competitor's. The big problem is going to come in not having the same level of actual intelligence that your competitors have. With RFID, you'll have real-time actual intelligence on product demand from the store backroom all the way up to the manufacturing line and then back to your suppliers. Your inventory will be much closer to where it needs to be when it needs to be there, and you will have a much more robust view of what is going on.
Q: Of course, you'll also be flooded with information. What advice do you have for folks trying to walk that razor-thin line between information availability and information overload?
A: That is a great question, Mitch.We get a lot of people wondering about how they can take action with all this data. If you don't decide that before you set the system up, all hell can break loose. You've got to get ahead of the data. If you aren't ready to handle the data to take action on it, then it is just more bad data.
With RFID, you've got something that is highly accurate. It is both a data-finding tool and a business intelligence tool. Before you install a system, you need to first answer the question "What will I do with all this data?" If you answer that question well on the front end, you can really harness the technology's capabilities.
It’s been an up and down year for the intermodal rail industry. Severe weather impacted operations early in the year. Yet the market absorbed those challenges and staged a modest recovery. By the end of the second quarter, total intermodal volumes had risen 7.9% year over year, according to the Intermodal Association of North America’s 2024 second-quarter report, released July 29. International containers, those 20- and 40-foot TEUs (20-foot equivalent units) coming into the nation’s ports, rose 13.3%. Domestic intermodal traffic, typically 53-foot containers, improved 5.0%, while trailers fell 20.6%.
“International volume provided the biggest lift,” noted Joni Casey, IANA’s president and CEO, who is retiring at the end of the year, in a news release announcing the report. “Domestic containers played a supporting role, especially important as the decline in TOFC [trailer on flatcar] moves continued.” Total IMC (intermodal marketing company) volumes increased 5.5% year over year in Q2, she added.
Nevertheless, troubling signs are on the horizon that could derail the market’s newfound stability. According to the Institute for Supply Management’s “Manufacturing ISM Report on Business” for August, economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in August for the fifth consecutive month (as measured on a year-over-year basis). But compared to July, the August index was up slightly to 47.2, or 0.4 percentage points.
And while the overall economy continued its expansion for the 52nd consecutive month (after one month of contraction in April 2020), U.S. manufacturing activity remained in contraction territory, the report’s author, Timothy R. Fiore, chair of the ISM’s Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, said.
“U.S. manufacturing activity contracted slower compared to last month. Demand continues to be weak, output declined, and inputs stayed accommodative,” he said in a statement, adding that three key related indexes—New Orders, New Export Orders, and Backlog of Orders—“remained in strong contraction territory.”
One silver lining has been the U.S. consumer, who has kept spending at a positive yet measured pace, providing an underpinning for the overall economy. That’s been good news for intermodal service providers looking for a more sustained recovery.
WHAT’S AN OPERATOR TO DO?
Larry Gross, founder and president of Gross Transportation Consulting,has seen any number of market cycles over his decades of work in the intermodal industry. “There is a lot of churn, a lot of uncertainty in the markets right now,” he’s observed. A lot of freight moved earlier in the year as shippers took steps to pull forward inventory in an attempt to avoid potential disruptions from various issues.
Those issues include a potential East and Gulf Coast port strike, labor unrest with Canada’s railroads (workers are now back on the job while their contract is in arbitration), continued geopolitical hostilities, concerns over the upcoming election, and the prospect of future new tariffs on a variety of imports next year.
Worries over a disruption at East Coast ports in particular “have caused a swing to the West Coast in terms of TEUs coming into North America,” says Gross. “There has definitely been a diversion,” he adds, citing container volumes out of the Pacific Northwest that were up 83% in July over last year. “The PNW is getting really congested,” and that, Gross says, is part of the reason why the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are seeing container volumes surge as well. “It’s a reversal of a long-term trend, which was west-to-east migration.”
Those trends also reflect routing decisions made months ago by shippers to avoid potential port strike disruptions, and which will take months to unwind, Gross points out. “Containers on the water today, headed to West Coast ports and eventually destined for transfer to intermodal trains, are based on decisions shippers made in the spring or before. They’re set in stone,” he says. So as intermodal operators look at that incoming traffic, they have to plan for and start repositioning assets to handle those volumes at those ports. And that takes time.
“August and September are typically the biggest months for international,” Gross adds. “October is the biggest month for domestic. The rail network, from all indications, is running smoothly. Trains generally have recovered [from earlier operating hiccups] and are running consistently, but it takes time for the system to fully reset,” he says, and it could take months for the system to balance out.
PLENTY OF CAPACITY
Intermodal rail capacity is not an issue, according to several reports. Whereas ample capacity and rate competition through most of 2024 caused shippers to move some freight from rail to road, “the bleeding has stopped,” says Gross. “The erosion of share from intermodal to truck” has subsided, and rail intermodal operators are working hard to “claw that traffic back,” he adds.
Of the overall volume of truckload freight moving 500 miles or more, excluding ISO container moves (moves of international intermodal containers coming off ships), domestic intermodal accounts for about 6% of the market, with truck accounting for 94%. During the pandemic, intermodal’s share hit nearly 7%. For the past six quarters, that share has returned to the more typical 6%.
“I am of the opinion that the market we are in right now with regard to freight is not that unusual,” says Gross. “We are not that far off” [from a more balanced market],” he adds. “[The railroads] have removed poor service as a reason for shippers to abandon intermodal. Now the door is open, and they have to close the sale.” For a shipper who is close to an origin and destination intermodal terminal, “it is almost unbeatable.”
Indeed, Class 1 railroads are making operational improvements, investing in capacity and infrastructure, and gearing up to aggressively go after more intermodal business as the year proceeds, buoyed by surging international import volumes, according to several industry sources.
At Union Pacific, which generated $5.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, “service levels and network performance for the second quarter remained strong, demonstrating our recoverability in the wake of major weather disruptions,” said Eric Gehringer, UP’s executive vice president of operations, in the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call. Freight car velocity was flat, as improvements in terminal dwell were offset by weather-related drops in train speeds.
He sees opportunity to drive stronger terminal dwell performance “by removing unnecessary car touches across the network.” Results also benefited from a 6% improvement in locomotive productivity driven by better network fluidity and improved asset utilization. Train length improved 2%, with June marking the first month ever with a UP train length over 9,600 feet. “That’s a remarkable achievement by the team as they continue to generate mainline capacity for future growth,” Gehringer said.
Looking ahead, Jennifer Hamann, UP’s executive vice president and CFO, noted “a lot of the drivers that were present in the second quarter are going to be present at least into the third quarter. International intermodal is staying strong, [and] coal is weaker.” On the industrial side of the business, Hamann said, “while we have great business development opportunities, there’s a little softness there.”
Added Jim Vena, UP’s CEO: “We’ve got a great team. They know what the end goal is. So I see us optimizing the railroad and getting better at how we operate.” Yet what really will help improve UP’s operating margin, Vena believes, “is revenue growth. We are pushing hard on that piece by both bringing in volume at the right price” and managing pricing effectively to account for inflation and other cost challenges the railroad has endured.
A FOCUS ON SERVICE
At BNSF, the railroad is leveraging a $3.92 billion capital plan this year to, among other things, add main track miles, expand intermodal parking, add rolling stock, increase production capacity at intermodal yards, improve technology, and make “resiliency investments” to harden its network against extreme weather conditions, according to Kendall Sloan, BNSF’s director of external communications.
“BNSF’s reach is broader than any other Class 1 railroad,” she notes. The railroad operates 32,500 miles of track, providing “direct access to the country’s biggest … inland markets and multiple service options,” with particular attention to customer service.
One example she cites is the BNSF’s partnership with intermodal operator J.B. Hunt. Last fall, the two companies jointly launched Quantum, a new intermodal service “to accommodate the service-sensitive highway freight needs of customer supply chains,” she says. Citing as its hallmarks consistency, agility, and speed, Sloan says Quantum is averaging “up to 98% on-time delivery,” generally providing a service that is a day faster than traditional intermodal.
On the technology side, BNSF has been investing in and deploying new technologies to better leverage data to provide improved analytics and support safety improvements. Among those have been “brake health effectiveness detectors, drones,” and other advanced equipment, software tools, and systems, all designed to provide more timely and accurate data. On the labor front, BNSF as of Sept. 4 had reached tentative collective bargaining agreements with six of its labor unions, months ahead of schedule. The agreements will now need to be ratified by covered employees.
In preparation for the upswing in demand expected from this year’s domestic intermodal peak season, BNSF since early July has deployed additional train crews, locomotives, and railcars across the Pacific Northwest, California, and Texas. The railroad so far has seen a 40% increase in Inland Point Intermodal (IPI) volumes (IPI moves are cargoes going from a port to a shipper’s door in the interior of the country via a domestic or international intermodal container), handling a record number of on-dock railcar loadings from Southern California’s ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in the first half of this year.
What are intermodal customers asking for? Reliable capacity; safe, efficient operations; and consistent, reliable performance that meets expected delivery times at a reasonable cost. For Class 1 railroads, that means continued investments across the board. Among BNSF’s initiatives in this regard are a planned multibillion-dollar investment in its Barstow (California) International Gateway and a master-planned logistics hub in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
“We know that our customers always are looking for new ways to move their shipments as safely and quickly as possible,” notes Sloan. That’s the underlying incentive for both the rail’s billion-dollar investments in the network and its focus on safety, exemplified by the railroad’s finishing last year with “the fewest injuries in BNSF’s history,” Sloan says. “We continue to lead the industry in safety and are committed to continuous improvement.”
OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD
As the intermodal rail market settles back to prepandemic levels, there remain opportunities, yet the constant competitive tug of war between over-the-road trucking and intermodal shows no signs of abating. IANA’s Casey expects the industry to continue to deliver modest growth—a prediction that was borne out in July’s and August’s upbeat volume numbers—fueled by containerized import traffic returning to the West Coast, which has seen double-digit gains for most of the year.
Domestic container growth, however, has not been as strong “due to tougher year-over-year comparisons and competition with over-the-road trucking,” she notes. “Still, modest growth of industrial activity and transloads from West Coast imports have provided a tailwind.”
With peak season in full swing, she believes the industry can avoid the congestion issues experienced during the pandemic. “Fleet owners have signaled that container velocity continues to trend to prepandemic levels. The intermodal network appears to have [sufficient] assets in place. And there has been no mention of any chassis supply constraints,” she says.
Yet challenges are looming. Among the most worrying to shippers is the prospect of a strike at East and Gulf Coast ports. “This would be disruptive not only for those locations, but also for a good portion of the intermodal supply chain,” she believes. “That would force shippers to execute contingency plans.” Other concerns center on the upcoming election, the prospect of higher tariffs under a new administration, and other disruptive “black swan” events.
On the opportunity side of the ledger, Casey cites the growth of nearshoring and reshoring as companies move operations from Asia to Mexico, increasing opportunity for cross-border U.S.-Mexico moves. She also cites transloading and the potential for domestic intermodal growth as well as the accelerating demand for “sustainable” transportation driven by clean air initiatives.
At its core, in her view, the intermodal rail industry still has three primary advantages over highway truckload service: “environmental stewardship, service consistency, and cost savings.” And those are advantages that will continue to endure and deliver sustainable value in any market cycle.
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
National nonprofit Wreaths Across America (WAA) kicked off its 2024 season this week with a call for volunteers. The group, which honors U.S. military veterans through a range of civic outreach programs, is seeking trucking companies and professional drivers to help deliver wreaths to cemeteries across the country for its annual wreath-laying ceremony, December 14.
“Wreaths Across America relies on the transportation industry to move the mission. The Honor Fleet, composed of dedicated carriers, professional drivers, and other transportation partners, guarantees the delivery of millions of sponsored veterans’ wreaths to their destination each year,” Courtney George, WAA’s director of trucking and industry relations, said in a statement Tuesday. “Transportation partners benefit from driver retention and recruitment, employee engagement, positive brand exposure, and the opportunity to give back to their community’s veterans and military families.”
WAA delivers wreaths to more than 4,500 locations nationwide, and as of this week had added more than 20 loads to be delivered this season. The wreaths are donated by sponsors from across the country, delivered by truckers, and laid at the graves of veterans by WAA volunteers.
Wreaths Across America
Transportation companies interested in joining the Honor Fleet can visit the WAA website to find an open lane or contact the WAA transportation team at trucking@wreathsacrossamerica.org for more information.
Toyota Material Handling and its nationwide network of dealers showcased their commitment to improving their local communities during the company’s annual “Lift the Community Day.” Since 2021, Toyota associates have participated in an annual day-long philanthropic event held near Toyota’s Columbus, Indiana, headquarters. This year, the initiative expanded to include participation from Toyota’s dealers, increasing the impact on communities throughout the U.S. A total of 324 Toyota associates completed 2,300 hours of community service during this year’s event.
The PMMI Foundation, the charitable arm of PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies, awarded nearly $200,000 in scholarships to students pursuing careers in the packaging and processing industry. Each year, the PMMI Foundation provides academic scholarships to students studying packaging, food processing, and engineering to underscore its commitment to the future of the packaging and processing industry.
Truck leasing and fleet management services provider Fleet Advantage hosted its “Kids Around the Corner Foundation” back-to-school backpack drive in July. During the event, company associates assembled 200 backpacks filled with essential school supplies for high school-age students. The backpacks were then delivered to Henderson Behavioral Health’s Youth & Family Services location in Tamarac, Florida.
For the past seven years, third-party logistics service specialist ODW Logistics has provided logistics support for the Pelotonia Ride Weekend, a campaign to raise funds for cancer research at The Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center–Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. As in the past, ODW provided inventory management services and transportation for the riders’ bicycles at this year’s event. In all, some 7,000 riders and 3,000 volunteers participated in the ride weekend.
After years in the military, service members and their spouses can find the transition to civilian life difficult. For many, a valuable support on that journey is the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) SkillBridge program. During their final 180 days of service, participants in the program are connected with companies that provide them with civilian work experience and training. There is no cost to those companies while the service member continues receiving military compensation and benefits.
Both sides benefit from the program. “We’re proud to work with SkillBridge to give back to our military veterans for the bravery and sacrifices they’ve made for all of us,” Troy Pederson, director of training and development at LiftOne, a Hyster-Yale dealer and established SkillBridge employer, said in a release. “In the last year, we’ve helped 10 SkillBridge interns transition from military to civilian life, and the value and positive impact of the program can’t be overstated. At LiftOne, we’ve gained so much from the experience and diverse mix of technical and leadership skills of our SkillBridge candidates.”