Allied Electronics’ DC expansion and automation project has doubled capacity and is speeding fulfillment of ready-to-ship inventory to customers throughout North America.
Victoria Kickham started her career as a newspaper reporter in the Boston area before moving into B2B journalism. She has covered manufacturing, distribution and supply chain issues for a variety of publications in the industrial and electronics sectors, and now writes about everything from forklift batteries to omnichannel business trends for DC Velocity.
Allied Electronics was nearing completion of an expansion to its Fort Worth, Texas, distribution center last March when the coronavirus pandemic forced designers, engineers, and project managers to pivot in order to keep the project moving. Classified as an essential business, the distributor of industrial components and automation and control products couldn’t stop dead in its tracks, with hundreds of front-line customers relying on its services. Those customers included hospitals, health-care organizations, and scores of manufacturers tasked with producing ventilators and other equipment needed to fight Covid-19. The only choice was to move forward.
“Many would say our timing for this project was terrible,” says Scott Jayes, Allied Electronics’ vice president of business operations, adding that the 200,000-square-foot, digitally enabled DC expansion was designed to meet Allied’s growth projections and was therefore a vital part of the company’s long-term strategy. “We chose to move forward. And it means that we’ve demonstrated, really, what this business can do despite challenges and adversity.”
Allied continued to serve customers out of part of the DC as it moved ahead with the implementation and testing of high-tech automation systems designed to increase the breadth and depth of its inventory while also speeding order fulfillment and boosting accuracy. As with most businesses, schedules were shifted and many tasks moved online as Allied and its automation solutions partner, Knapp, continued work on the Fort Worth expansion during the height of the pandemic. Fortunately, the team was 10 weeks ahead of schedule in March, a factor that provided much-needed buffer time as they moved forward. The project went live in June 2020—three weeks ahead of schedule—and has doubled the distributor’s inventory capacity to more than 400,000 unique stock-keeping units (SKUs) via the use of high-density storage and automated product retrieval and packaging processes, with additional space to double the number of SKUs stocked again over the next five years.
“It has not come without some pain,” Jayes says, explaining that due to the pandemic, some of the engineers on the multinational design team either had to be sent home or could not travel to Fort Worth for final testing and inspection of the system as planned, causing delays and requiring some workarounds. (Ultimately, Allied and Knapp found ways to test the system remotely and were eventually able to bring the engineers back on site for final inspections, once travel bans were lifted.) “But we truly believe what we’ve delivered is a better solution and [that it] ultimately drives a better [solution] for our customers, suppliers, and our people,” he adds.
PLANNING FOR GROWTH
Allied began planning for the DC expansion in 2018, with input from customers and suppliers and with an eye toward growth. As Jayes and his colleague, Allied project manager Chris Hewerdine, explain, the initiative was designed to double and eventually triple the facility’s capacity. Before the expansion, Allied stored about 180,000 SKUs in Fort Worth, including automation and control components as well as electronic, electrical, mechanical, and facility maintenance products. Since the facility’s completion in June, the business has been focused on ramping up its new-product introductions and expanding its offerings.
“We’ve created all this space, and now we’ve got to fill it,” Hewerdine says, adding that managers hope to process about half of the Fort Worth picks out of the new building by the end of Allied’s fiscal year in March. That process involves moving some existing stock from the old facility to the new automated building as well as adding new products.
“Now, our objective is to fill [the building] with the right products that our customers want [and to do it] as quickly as possible,” Jayes adds.
That’s because new-product introductions are an important part of the electronic components and automation business. Allied’s customers are designers, engineers, manufacturers, and industrial organizations looking for a variety of components and solutions for their own product, equipment, and facility designs. That means the distributor is constantly working to add items and create the widest assortment of solutions possible. Customers typically purchase about four products per order, heightening the need for a warehouse system that allows for the swift picking, packing, and shipping of high volumes of multiline orders.
“We knew we’d need automation to help simplify [our] processes” as well as remove unnecessary steps and speed operations, explains Hewerdine. “It was key that we deliver automation.”
MAKING AUTOMATION A REALITY
Allied’s expanded DC is fully automated and powered by Knapp’s proprietary warehouse control software. The centerpiece is an automated order, storage, and retrieval system (OSR) with goods-to-person picking technology. Using robotic shuttles, the OSR can pick products from 118,000 locations and deliver them automatically to 35 picking stations. The system also features a hanging pocket sorter, which is an overhead system that conveys, sorts, and sequences items. It uses a unique sorting algorithm that puts parts that were batch-picked in various warehouse zones into a precise sequence and then delivers hanging and flat-packed goods together to a single pack station.
Fred Marten, director of project management for Knapp’s retail solutions business unit, says the pocket sorter’s dynamic buffering and sequencing capabilities allow it to amalgamate multiline and single-line orders, helping Allied better manage the high volume of orders that flow through the facility each day. Marten, who worked directly on the project, says the system also features automated packing technology that pre-forms right-sized boxes and uses robotic packing stations to automatically fill and close the boxes. The technology expedites the shipping process while also reducing packaging waste, he adds.
Allied reaped the rewards of its automation investment almost instantly and is seeing steady improvement as it works to get the system fully operational. By the fall of 2020, picking speed in Fort Worth had improved by 30% and packing throughput had doubled, Hewerdine and Jayes report. To provide a sense of the volume through the facility, they note that the OSR can process 2,000 order lines per hour, the pocket sorter can process 2,500 order lines per hour, and the automated packaging technology can process 2,400 packages per hour.
In addition to the productivity improvements that directly benefit customers, Jayes and Hewerdine emphasize that the expanded DC also serves as a showcase for automated equipment that makes a difference for its suppliers and employees. Many of Allied’s supplier partners make the components and parts used to power the DC—sensors, controls, switches, connectors, and the like—so the facility creates a working example of the innovation those suppliers bring to the market. Employees gain from the efficiencies a modernized workplace provides while also learning how to work with the latest warehouse automation technology.
“[We are] giving our suppliers a reason to want to invest and work with us … [while also making] this a place where people want to work. That was a key goal,” Jayes explains.
Those benefits are especially evident during a pandemic that continues to challenge warehouse and DC employees around the world. Despite a bumpy ride completing the project, the finished product creates a safer work environment, where employees can be more spread out and there is less dependence on human labor.
Most importantly, Allied needed to create a solution that worked on many fronts and wasn’t just a bunch of “shiny stuff,” as Jayes puts it.
“It needed to be a solution that worked [and] a system that makes things better for our people,” he says. “We spent a long time in research and planning to help us achieve those goals.”
Warehouse automation orders declined by 3% in 2024, according to a February report from market research firm Interact Analysis. The company said the decline was due to economic, political, and market-specific challenges, including persistently high interest rates in many regions and the residual effects of an oversupply of warehouses built during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The research also found that increasing competition from Chinese vendors is expected to drive down prices and slow revenue growth over the report’s forecast period to 2030.
Global macro-economic factors such as high interest rates, political uncertainty around elections, and the Chinese real estate crisis have “significantly impacted sales cycles, slowing the pace of orders,” according to the report.
Despite the decline, analysts said growth is expected to pick up from 2025, which they said they anticipate will mark a year of slow recovery for the sector. Pre-pandemic growth levels are expected to return in 2026, with long-term expansion projected at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% between 2024 and 2030.
The analysis also found two market segments that are bucking the trend: durable manufacturing and food & beverage industries continued to spend on automation during the downturn. Warehouse automation revenues in food & beverage, in particular, were bolstered by cold-chain automation, as well as by large-scale projects from consumer-packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. The sectors registered the highest growth in warehouse automation revenues between 2022 and 2024, with increases of 11% (durable manufacturing) and 10% (food & beverage), according to the research.
The Swedish supply chain software company Kodiak Hub is expanding into the U.S. market, backed by a $6 million venture capital boost for its supplier relationship management (SRM) platform.
The Stockholm-based company says its move could help U.S. companies build resilient, sustainable supply chains amid growing pressure from regulatory changes, emerging tariffs, and increasing demands for supply chain transparency.
According to the company, its platform gives procurement teams a 360-degree view of supplier risk, resiliency, and performance, helping them to make smarter decisions faster. Kodiak Hub says its artificial intelligence (AI) based tech has helped users to reduce supplier onboarding times by 80%, improve supplier engagement by 90%, achieve 7-10% cost savings on total spend, and save approximately 10 hours per week by automating certain SRM tasks.
The Swedish venture capital firm Oxx had a similar message when it announced in November that it would back Kodiak Hub with new funding. Oxx says that Kodiak Hub is a better tool for chief procurement officers (CPOs) and strategic sourcing managers than existing software platforms like Excel sheets, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, or Procure-to-Pay suites.
“As demand for transparency and fair-trade practices grows, organizations must strengthen their supply chains to protect their reputation, profitability, and long-term trust,” Malin Schmidt, founder & CEO of Kodiak Hub, said in a release. “By embedding AI-driven insights directly into procurement workflows, our platform helps procurement teams anticipate these risks and unlock major opportunities for growth.”
Here's our monthly roundup of some of the charitable works and donations by companies in the material handling and logistics space.
For the sixth consecutive year, dedicated contract carriage and freight management services provider Transervice Logistics Inc. collected books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines for Book Fairies, a nonprofit book donation organization in the New York Tri-State area. Transervice employees broke their own in-house record last year by donating 13 boxes of print and video assets to children in under-resourced communities on Long Island and the five boroughs of New York City.
Logistics real estate investment and development firm Dermody Properties has recognized eight community organizations in markets where it operates with its 2024 Annual Thanksgiving Capstone awards. The organizations, which included food banks and disaster relief agencies, received a combined $85,000 in awards ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
Prime Inc. truck driver Dee Sova has donated $5,000 to Harmony House, an organization that provides shelter and support services to domestic violence survivors in Springfield, Missouri. The donation follows Sova's selection as the 2024 recipient of the Trucking Cares Foundation's John Lex Premier Achievement Award, which was accompanied by a $5,000 check to be given in her name to a charity of her choice.
Employees of dedicated contract carrier Lily Transportation donated dog food and supplies to a local animal shelter at a holiday event held at the company's Fort Worth, Texas, location. The event, which benefited City of Saginaw (Texas) Animal Services, was coordinated by "Lily Paws," a dedicated committee within Lily Transportation that focuses on improving the lives of shelter dogs nationwide.
Freight transportation conglomerate Averitt has continued its support of military service members by participating in the "10,000 for the Troops" card collection program organized by radio station New Country 96.3 KSCS in Dallas/Fort Worth. In 2024, Averitt associates collected and shipped more than 18,000 holiday cards to troops overseas. Contributions included cards from 17 different Averitt facilities, primarily in Texas, along with 4,000 cards from the company's corporate office in Cookeville, Tennessee.
Electric vehicle (EV) sales have seen slow and steady growth, as the vehicles continue to gain converts among consumers and delivery fleet operators alike. But a consistent frustration for drivers has been pulling up to a charging station only to find that the charger has been intentionally broken or disabled.
To address that threat, the EV charging solution provider ChargePoint has launched two products to combat charger vandalism.
The first is a cut-resistant charging cable that's designed to deter theft. The cable, which incorporates what the manufacturer calls "novel cut-resistant materials," is substantially more difficult for would-be vandals to cut but is still flexible enough for drivers to maneuver comfortably, the California firm said. ChargePoint intends to make its cut-resistant cables available for all of its commercial and fleet charging stations, and, starting in the middle of the year, will license the cable design to other charging station manufacturers as part of an industrywide effort to combat cable theft and vandalism.
The second product, ChargePoint Protect, is an alarm system that detects charging cable tampering in real time and literally sounds the alarm using the charger's existing speakers, screens, and lighting system. It also sends SMS or email messages to ChargePoint customers notifying them that the system's alarm has been triggered.
ChargePoint says it expects these two new solutions, when combined, will benefit charging station owners by reducing station repair costs associated with vandalism and EV drivers by ensuring they can trust charging stations to work when and where they need them.
New Jersey is home to the most congested freight bottleneck in the country for the seventh straight year, according to research from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), released today.
ATRI’s annual list of the Top 100 Truck Bottlenecks aims to highlight the nation’s most congested highways and help local, state, and federal governments target funding to areas most in need of relief. The data show ways to reduce chokepoints, lower emissions, and drive economic growth, according to the researchers.
The 2025 Top Truck Bottleneck List measures the level of truck-involved congestion at more than 325 locations on the national highway system. The analysis is based on an extensive database of freight truck GPS data and uses several customized software applications and analysis methods, along with terabytes of data from trucking operations, to produce a congestion impact ranking for each location. The bottleneck locations detailed in the latest ATRI list represent the top 100 congested locations, although ATRI continuously monitors more than 325 freight-critical locations, the group said.
For the seventh straight year, the intersection of I-95 and State Route 4 near the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is the top freight bottleneck in the country. The remaining top 10 bottlenecks include: Chicago, I-294 at I-290/I-88; Houston, I-45 at I-69/US 59; Atlanta, I-285 at I-85 (North); Nashville: I-24/I-40 at I-440 (East); Atlanta: I-75 at I-285 (North); Los Angeles, SR 60 at SR 57; Cincinnati, I-71 at I-75; Houston, I-10 at I-45; and Atlanta, I-20 at I-285 (West).
ATRI’s analysis, which utilized data from 2024, found that traffic conditions continue to deteriorate from recent years, partly due to work zones resulting from increased infrastructure investment. Average rush hour truck speeds were 34.2 miles per hour (MPH), down 3% from the previous year. Among the top 10 locations, average rush hour truck speeds were 29.7 MPH.
In addition to squandering time and money, these delays also waste fuel—with trucks burning an estimated 6.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel and producing more than 65 million metric tons of additional carbon emissions while stuck in traffic jams, according to ATRI.
On a positive note, ATRI said its analysis helps quantify the value of infrastructure investment, pointing to improvements at Chicago’s Jane Byrne Interchange as an example. Once the number one truck bottleneck in the country for three years in a row, the recently constructed interchange saw rush hour truck speeds improve by nearly 25% after construction was completed, according to the report.
“Delays inflicted on truckers by congestion are the equivalent of 436,000 drivers sitting idle for an entire year,” ATRI President and COO Rebecca Brewster said in a statement announcing the findings. “These metrics are getting worse, but the good news is that states do not need to accept the status quo. Illinois was once home to the top bottleneck in the country, but following a sustained effort to expand capacity, the Jane Byrne Interchange in Chicago no longer ranks in the top 10. This data gives policymakers a road map to reduce chokepoints, lower emissions, and drive economic growth.”