NACCO Materials Handling Group (NMHG), the parent company of Hyster Co. and Yale Materials Handling Corp.,
announced a corporate reorganization last week during the Modex 2014 show in Atlanta.
Greenville, N.C.-based NMHG said it would focus its sales and service offerings on meeting the material handling
requirements and challenges of end-users in specific industries and market segments. Toward that end, the company has
created three specialized teams: Warehouse, Counterbalance, and Big Trucks. Jonathan Dawley has been named president of
the Big Trucks group, and Bill Pfleger is vice president, Counterbalance Solutions. The leader of Warehouse Solutions has
not yet been named.
David Furman, recently appointed president of NMHG sales, will lead sales for all three product groups. The Hyster and
Yale sales teams will be realigned in three North American regions, as well as Latin America and national accounts. According to
NMHG, the new structure will strengthen the alignment between the parent company and the Hyster and Yale dealer networks.
The realignment also is intended to create a more customer-centric, nimble, and responsive organization that can focus on
broader material handling solutions, said Chuck Pascarelli, president of sales and marketing for NMHG.
NMHG, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyster-Yale Materials Handling Inc., designs, manufactures, sells, and services lift
trucks and aftermarket parts for the Hyster, Yale, and Utilev brands.
A measure of business conditions for shippers improved in September due to lower fuel costs, looser trucking capacity, and lower freight rates, but the freight transportation forecasting firm FTR still expects readings to be weaker and closer to neutral through its two-year forecast period.
Bloomington, Indiana-based FTR is maintaining its stance that trucking conditions will improve, even though its Shippers Conditions Index (SCI) improved in September to 4.6 from a 2.9 reading in August, reaching its strongest level of the year.
“The fact that September’s index is the strongest since last December is not a sign that shippers’ market conditions are steadily improving,” Avery Vise, FTR’s vice president of trucking, said in a release.
“September and May were modest outliers this year in a market that is at least becoming more balanced. We expect that trend to continue and for SCI readings to be mostly negative to neutral in 2025 and 2026. However, markets in transition tend to be volatile, so further outliers are likely and possibly in both directions. The supply chain implications of tariffs are a wild card for 2025 especially,” he said.
The SCI tracks the changes representing four major conditions in the U.S. full-load freight market: freight demand, freight rates, fleet capacity, and fuel price. Combined into a single index, a positive score represents good, optimistic conditions, while a negative score represents bad, pessimistic conditions.
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.
The Florida logistics technology startup OneRail has raised $42 million in venture backing to lift the fulfillment software company its next level of growth, the company said today.
The “series C” round was led by Los Angeles-based Aliment Capital, with additional participation from new investors eGateway Capital and Florida Opportunity Fund, as well as current investors Arsenal Growth Equity, Piva Capital, Bullpen Capital, Las Olas Venture Capital, Chicago Ventures, Gaingels and Mana Ventures. According to OneRail, the funding comes amidst a challenging funding environment where venture capital funding in the logistics sector has seen a 90% decline over the past two years.
The latest infusion follows the firm’s $33 million Series B round in 2022, and its move earlier in 2024 to acquire the Vancouver, Canada-based company Orderbot, a provider of enterprise inventory and distributed order management (DOM) software.
Orlando-based OneRail says its omnichannel fulfillment solution pairs its OmniPoint cloud software with a logistics as a service platform and a real-time, connected network of 12 million drivers. The firm says that its OmniPointsoftware automates fulfillment orchestration and last mile logistics, intelligently selecting the right place to fulfill inventory from, the right shipping mode, and the right carrier to optimize every order.
“This new funding round enables us to deepen our decision logic upstream in the order process to help solve some of the acute challenges facing retailers and wholesalers, such as order sourcing logic defaulting to closest store to customer to fulfill inventory from, which leads to split orders, out-of-stocks, or worse, cancelled orders,” OneRail Founder and CEO Bill Catania said in a release. “OneRail has revolutionized that process with a dynamic fulfillment solution that quickly finds available inventory in full, from an array of stores or warehouses within a localized radius of the customer, to meet the delivery promise, which ultimately transforms the end-customer experience.”