the ancient art of military logistics
Re: "mission possible," June 2009
Great article about the transition efforts under way in Iraq. DC VELOCITY has done an excellent job updating readers on the efforts of our military forces around the world. Since "logistics" was born out of ancient military campaigns, it is only natural that the magazine continue to feature these types of articles. I also enjoyed the fact that the logistician was a female. Scott McWilliams, OHL
well, duh!
Re: "the fatal flaw in ERP," TechWatch, March 2009
Of course this solution [Mark Payne's formula for calculating how much a company must produce to meet demand] is right. Inventory is what is supposed to be variable along with demand. In the short term, production (supply) cannot be variable. Andrew DeWitt, Tosca Ltd.
talkin' about (energy) generation
Re: "cell-ing the transition," June 2009
Mark B. Solomon's otherwise excellent article on hydrogen fuel cells for lift trucks included an estimate by a battery-charger developer that a fuel cell-powered lift truck uses three times more energy than a truck using a battery. This statement is meaningless without specifying both how the hydrogen is produced and how the electricity used to charge batteries is being generated.
According to an Argonne National Laboratory study published in 2008 (Full Fuel-Cycle Comparison of Forklift Propulsion Systems), a fuel cell forklift using hydrogen produced on site from natural gas—a technology that is commercially available from Nuvera and others—uses less energy than a battery-powered forklift when recharged with standard U.S. grid electricity, on a national average basis.
The San Francisco tech startup Vooma has raised $16 million in venture funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed for freight brokers and carriers, the company said today.
The backing came from a $13 million boost in “series A” funding led by Craft Ventures, which followed an earlier seed round of $3.6 million led by Index Ventures with participation from angel investors including founders and executives from major logistics and technology companies such as Motive, Project44, Ryder, and Uber Freight.
Founded in 2023, the firm has built “Vooma Agents,” which it calls a multi-channel AI platform for logistics. The system uses various agents to operate across email, text and voice channels, allowing for automation in workflows that were previously unaddressable by existing systems. According to Vooma, its platform lets logistics companies scale up their operations by reducing time spent on tedious and manual work and creating space to solve real logistical challenges, while also investing in critical relationships.
The company’s solutions include: Vooma Quote, which identifies quotes and drafts email responses, Vooma Build, a data-entry assistant for load building, and Vooma Voice, which can make and receive calls for brokers and carriers. Additional options are: Vooma Insights and the future releases of Vooma Agent and Vooma Schedule.
“The United States moves approximately 11.5 billion tons of truckloads annually, and moving freight from point A to B requires hundreds of touchpoints between shippers, brokers and carriers,” Vooma co-founder, who is the former CEO of ASG LogisTech, said in a release. “By introducing AI that fits naturally into existing systems, workflows and communication channels used across the industry, we are meaningfully reducing the tasks people dislike and freeing up their time and headspace for more meaningful and complex challenges.”
The Dutch ship building company Concordia Damen has worked with four partner firms to build two specialized vessels that will serve the offshore wind industry by transporting large, and ever growing, wind turbine components, the company said today.
The first ship, Rotra Horizon, launched yesterday at Jiangsu Zhenjiang Shipyard, and its sister ship, Rotra Futura, is expected to be delivered to client Amasus in 2025. The project involved a five-way collaboration between Concordia Damen and Amasus, deugro Danmark, Siemens Gamesa, and DEKC Maritime.
The design of the 550-foot Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon builds on the previous vessels Rotra Mare and Rotra Vente, which were also developed by Concordia Damen, and have been operating since 2016. However, the new vessels are equipped for the latest generation of wind turbine components, which are becoming larger and heavier. They can handle that increased load with a Roll-On/Roll-Off (RO/RO) design, specialized ramps, and three Liebherr cranes, allowing turbine blades to be stowed in three tiers, providing greater flexibility in loading methods and cargo configurations.
“For the Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon, we, along with our partners, have focused extensively on energy savings and an environmentally friendly design,” Concordia Damen Managing Director Chris Kornet said in a release. “The aerodynamic and hydro-optimized hull design, combined with a special low-resistance coating, contributes to lower fuel consumption. Furthermore, the vessels are equipped with an advanced Wärtsilä main engine, which consumes 15 percent less fuel and has a smaller CO₂ emission footprint than current standards.”
Specifically, loaded import volume rose 11.2% in October 2024, compared to October 2023, as port operators processed 81,498 TEUs (twenty-foot containers), versus 73,281 TEUs in 2023, the port said today.
“Overall, the Port’s loaded import cargo is trending towards its pre-pandemic level,” Port of Oakland Maritime Director Bryan Brandes said in a release. “This steady increase in import volume in 2024 is an encouraging trend. We are also seeing a rise in US agricultural exports through Oakland. Thanks to refrigerated warehousing on Port property near the maritime terminals and convenient truck and rail access, we are well-positioned to continue to grow ag export cargo volume through the Oakland Seaport.”
Looking deeper into its October statistics, loaded exports declined 3.4%, registering 66,649 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 68,974 TEUs in October 2023. Despite that slight decline, the category has grown 6.7% between January and October 2024 compared to the same period last year.
In fact, Oakland’s exports have been declining over the past decade, a long-term trend that is largely due to the reduction in demand for recycled paper exports. However, agricultural exports have made up for some of the export losses from paper, the port said.
For the fourth quarter, empty exports bumped up 30.6%. Port operators processed 29,750 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 22,775 TEUs in October 2023. And empty imports increased 15.3%, with 15,682 TEUs transiting Port facilities in October 2024, in contrast to 13,597 TEUs in October 2023.
A growing number of organizations are identifying ways to use GenAI to streamline their operations and accelerate innovation, using that new automation and efficiency to cut costs, carry out tasks faster and more accurately, and foster the creation of new products and services for additional revenue streams. That was the conclusion from ISG’s “2024 ISG Provider Lens global Generative AI Services” report.
The most rapid development of enterprise GenAI projects today is happening on text-based applications, primarily due to relatively simple interfaces, rapid ROI, and broad usefulness. Companies have been especially aggressive in implementing chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), which can provide personalized assistance, customer support, and automated communication on a massive scale, ISG said.
However, most organizations have yet to tap GenAI’s potential for applications based on images, audio, video and data, the report says. Multimodal GenAI is still evolving toward mainstream adoption, but use cases are rapidly emerging, and with ongoing advances in neural networks and deep learning, they are expected to become highly integrated and sophisticated soon.
Future GenAI projects will also be more customized, as the sector sees a major shift from fine-tuning of LLMs to smaller models that serve specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, ISG says. Enterprises and service providers increasingly recognize that customized, domain-specific AI models offer significant advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and performance. Customized GenAI can also deliver on demands like the need for privacy and security, specialization of tasks, and integration of AI into existing operations.
The Port of Oakland has been awarded $50 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) to modernize wharves and terminal infrastructure at its Outer Harbor facility, the port said today.
Those upgrades would enable the Outer Harbor to accommodate Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCVs), which are now a regular part of the shipping fleet calling on West Coast ports. Each of these ships has a handling capacity of up to 24,000 TEUs (20-foot containers) but are currently restricted at portions of Oakland’s Outer Harbor by aging wharves which were originally designed for smaller ships.
According to the port, those changes will let it handle newer, larger vessels, which are more efficient, cost effective, and environmentally cleaner to operate than older ships. Specific investments for the project will include: wharf strengthening, structural repairs, replacing container crane rails, adding support piles, strengthening support beams, and replacing electrical bus bar system to accommodate larger ship-to-shore cranes.