Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
DHL eCommerce has opened a $20 million, automated distribution center in New Jersey, saying Thursday that the facility will support improved productivity, speed, and throughput in parcel sorting as retailers struggle to staff their DCs in an era of low unemployment and high customer expectations.
DHL says the 200,000-square foot site will provide consolidation, not fulfillment. As the newest—and now the largest—of DHL's 19 U.S. consolidation centers, the site serves to save time and money by pre-sorting small parcels before inducting them into a nearby U.S. Postal Service (USPS) facility for last-mile delivery, the company said.
Its high-speed automation will process small e-commerce orders that typically weigh three pounds or less, although it can accept parcels up to five pounds each. Its automated systems are designed to handle the flexible, shoe box-sized Tyvek (or "poly-bag") sacks increasingly used instead of rigid cardboard boxes to ship apparel and other soft items.
DHL will use this New Jersey facility as a test bed for that approach, and plans to roll out similar designs in Los Angeles and Chicago if it meets expectations, Lee Spratt, CEO of DHL eCommerce Americas, said in an interview at a DHL press event in New York City.
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The investment is needed to support its customers' growing e-commerce volumes by delivering increased reliability and faster shipment delivery, the firm says. Retailers are facing increased pressure to deliver fast, reliable shipping as e-commerce expands from a monolithic, eight-week holiday peak into a variety of smaller peaks throughout the year, he said.
"Cyber Monday lasted into Cyber Thursday this year, and it is really becoming Cyber Week," Spratt said in an interview. In addition to the traditional Black Friday holiday sales season, other online shopping surges now include Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime Day, Alibaba Group's Singles Day (also known as 11/11), and repeating events such as monthly and end-of-quarter mailings by subscription services, DHL says.
"By late summer, we start forecasting peak season volume with our customers, then we handle that work with a combination of DHL associates and temporary employees. This automation allows us to be less reliant on those temporary jobs," Spratt said.
DHL says its new facility can relieve the pressure of hiring surges by offering the ability to process up to 40,000 shipments per hour, 60 percent more than an equivalent, non-automated facility. The 66-dock DC will employ 200 people and incorporate a range of sorting and scanning technologies that enable increased throughput and less manual processing of shipments compared to a traditional DC, the company said.
In a walking tour of the Avenel, N.J., facility, DHL said the site uses a crossbelt conveyer sorting system and automated bar-code scanning functionality, both provided by material handling vendor Beumer. Slow moving packages move through the entire facility within a 36-hour maximum, while fast products enter and exit the facility within a single, five-hour overnight shift from 9pm to 2am, DHL said.
"In this challenging market environment, with e-commerce merchants enjoying record shipment levels and the economy close to full employment, we are investing in more automation as the most effective way of enabling growth and improving service levels while ensuring our costs remain competitive," Spratt said in a release. "Our new distribution center in New Jersey is the most modern and efficient facility in the DHL eCommerce Americas network to date. It will help us to further support merchants grow their e-commerce businesses domestically as well as internationally, ensuring a high quality experience for their customers."
Supply chain planning (SCP) leaders working on transformation efforts are focused on two major high-impact technology trends, including composite AI and supply chain data governance, according to a study from Gartner, Inc.
"SCP leaders are in the process of developing transformation roadmaps that will prioritize delivering on advanced decision intelligence and automated decision making," Eva Dawkins, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a release. "Composite AI, which is the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, will drive the optimization and automation of many planning activities at scale, while supply chain data governance is the foundational key for digital transformation.”
Their pursuit of those roadmaps is often complicated by frequent disruptions and the rapid pace of technological innovation. But Gartner says those leaders can accelerate the realized value of technology investments by facilitating a shift from IT-led to business-led digital leadership, with SCP leaders taking ownership of multidisciplinary teams to advance business operations, channels and products.
“A sound data governance strategy supports advanced technologies, such as composite AI, while also facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain technology ecosystem,” said Dawkins. “Without attention to data governance, SCP leaders will likely struggle to achieve their expected ROI on key technology investments.”
The British logistics robot vendor Dexory this week said it has raised $80 million in venture funding to support an expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered features, grow its global team, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomous robots.
A “significant focus” continues to be on expanding across the U.S. market, where Dexory is live with customers in seven states and last month opened a U.S. headquarters in Nashville. The Series B will also enhance development and production facilities at its UK headquarters, the firm said.
The “series B” funding round was led by DTCP, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, along with existing investors Atomico, Lakestar, Capnamic, and several angels from the logistics industry. With the close of the round, Dexory has now raised $120 million over the past three years.
Dexory says its product, DexoryView, provides real-time visibility across warehouses of any size through its autonomous mobile robots and AI. The rolling bots use sensor and image data and continuous data collection to perform rapid warehouse scans and create digital twins of warehouse spaces, allowing for optimized performance and future scenario simulations.
Originally announced in September, the move will allow Deutsche Bahn to “fully focus on restructuring the rail infrastructure in Germany and providing climate-friendly passenger and freight transport operations in Germany and Europe,” Werner Gatzer, Chairman of the DB Supervisory Board, said in a release.
For its purchase price, DSV gains an organization with around 72,700 employees at over 1,850 locations. The new owner says it plans to investment around one billion euros in coming years to promote additional growth in German operations. Together, DSV and Schenker will have a combined workforce of approximately 147,000 employees in more than 90 countries, earning pro forma revenue of approximately $43.3 billion (based on 2023 numbers), DSV said.
After removing that unit, Deutsche Bahn retains its core business called the “Systemverbund Bahn,” which includes passenger transport activities in Germany, rail freight activities, operational service units, and railroad infrastructure companies. The DB Group, headquartered in Berlin, employs around 340,000 people.
“We have set clear goals to structurally modernize Deutsche Bahn in the areas of infrastructure, operations and profitability and focus on the core business. The proceeds from the sale will significantly reduce DB’s debt and thus make an important contribution to the financial stability of the DB Group. At the same time, DB Schenker will gain a strong strategic owner in DSV,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said in a release.
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.
Serious inland flooding and widespread power outages are likely to sweep across Florida and other Southeast states in coming days with the arrival of Hurricane Helene, which is now predicted to make landfall Thursday evening along Florida’s northwest coast as a major hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the most catastrophic landfall impact is expected in the sparsely-population Big Bend area of Florida, it’s not only sea-front cities that are at risk. Since Helene is an “unusually large storm,” its flooding, rainfall, and high winds won’t be limited only to the Gulf Coast, but are expected to travel hundreds of miles inland, the weather service said. Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in the region even before the storm comes ashore, and the wet conditions will continue to move northward into the southern Appalachians region through Friday, dumping storm total rainfall amounts of up to 18 inches. Specifically, the major flood risk includes the urban areas around Tallahassee, metro Atlanta, and western North Carolina.
In addition to its human toll, the storm could exert serious business impacts, according to the supply chain mapping and monitoring firm Resilinc. Those will be largely triggered by significant flooding, which could halt oil operations, force mandatory evacuations, restrict ports, and disrupt air traffic.
While the storm’s track is currently forecast to miss the critical ports of Miami and New Orleans, it could still hurt operations throughout the Southeast agricultural belt, which produces products like soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, and tobacco, according to Everstream Analytics.
That widespread footprint could also hinder supply chain and logistics flows along stretches of interstate highways I-10 and I-75 and on regional rail lines operated by Norfolk Southern and CSX. And Hurricane Helene could also likely impact business operations by unleashing power outages, deep flooding, and wind damage in northern Florida portions of Georgia, Everstream Analytics said.
Before the storm had even touched Florida soil, recovery efforts were already being launched by humanitarian aid group the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it is urging residents in the storm's path across the Southeast to heed evacuation notices and safety advisories, and reminding members of the logistics community that their post-storm help could be needed soon. The group will continue to update its Disaster Micro-Site with Hurricane Helene resources and with requests for donated logistics assistance, most of which will start arriving within 24 to 72 hours after the storm’s initial landfall, ALAN said.