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.
As a 104-year-old manufacturer of heating, industrial, and refrigeration systems, The Viessmann Group is a pillar of the German economy. Now in its fourth generation of ownership by its founding family, the company in 2019 employed some 12,300 people in 12 production facilities and booked sales of $3.2 billion.
However, managing warehouses full of climate-management products like oil- and gas-fueled boilers and hot-water tanks requires significant forklift operations. So the company recently decided to install a forklift guidance system with the goals of optimizing internal material flows; increasing lift truck efficiency; saving time, cost, and energy; and improving on-site safety.
The company also wanted a way to track inventory throughout the building. Specifically, Viessmann was looking for a solution that would automatically log the locations of pallets in order to keep track of work-in-progress materials, all without requiring additional scanning steps or slowing the flow of pallets as they’re continually shuffled around the facility throughout the day.
For help with the project, Viessmann turned to SEP Logistik AG, a Bayern, Germany-based developer of warehouse management software. That firm recommended a product called the RELAG-System - SLS, a forklift guidance system with real-time location system (RTLS) functionality. The system’s forklift-tracking ability is enabled, in turn, by the automated navigation technology (ANT) vehicle localization platform from BlueBotics SA, a Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland-based developer of navigation technology for industrial equipment.
Now running in Viessmann’s Allendorf, Germany, headquarters site, the system is able to locate pallets with specific material numbers and track inventory throughout the factory in real time. Once a pallet has been logged into the system, there is no need for any further scanning to locate materials, the company says.
NO MORE SEARCH TIME
Viessmann installed the system in its 215,000-square-foot sheet metal production area, where workers transport 1,000 pallets of semi-finished products every day between individual machining centers and the powder plant. Fifteen forklifts equipped with RELAG-System and ANT software now handle that workload over three shifts.
“The new system means the number of forklifts per shift can be reduced by 20%, with search times, startup times, and forklift downtimes a thing of the past,” Udo Ungemach, head of logistics at Viessmann, said in a statement.
The BlueBotics ANT solution deployed on the forklifts uses natural-feature navigation technology based on the identification of permanent features in the environment—such as walls and pillars—to identify the location of each vehicle and then relay this information to the RELAG-System. Next, the RELAG-System dispatches the most suitable vehicle to retrieve each pallet and provides the operator with the most efficient route through the facility, based on the locations and types of forklifts on the shop floor, the trucks’ job schedules, and the pallets’ destinations.
Thanks to that streamlined workflow, the system can optimize forklift utilization, reduce the time needed to retrieve pallets, and cut operational costs, according to Viessmann. The system can also notify an operator if a pallet is placed in the wrong position and analyze vehicle locations to avoid accidents through a collision warning system, automatically slowing vehicles in critical areas.
“Augmenting our workforce with advanced industry-leading tools from BlueBotics helps us serve both our internal and external customers more efficiently,” Ungemach said in the statement. “The system fits well with the lean philosophy of Viessmann and with the need for systems to serve employees and not vice versa. We expect to have a return on our investment within about three years.”
RJW Logistics Group, a logistics solutions provider (LSP) for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, has received a “strategic investment” from Boston-based private equity firm Berkshire partners, and now plans to drive future innovations and expand its geographic reach, the Woodridge, Illinois-based company said Tuesday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company said that CEO Kevin Williamson and other members of RJW management will continue to be “significant investors” in the company, while private equity firm Mason Wells, which invested in RJW in 2019, will maintain a minority investment position.
RJW is an asset-based transportation, logistics, and warehousing provider, operating more than 7.3 million square feet of consolidation warehouse space in the transportation hubs of Chicago and Dallas and employing 1,900 people. RJW says it partners with over 850 CPG brands and delivers to more than 180 retailers nationwide. According to the company, its retail logistics solutions save cost, improve visibility, and achieve industry-leading On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) performance. Those improvements drive increased in-stock rates and sales, benefiting both CPG brands and their retailer partners, the firm says.
"After several years of mitigating inflation, disruption, supply shocks, conflicts, and uncertainty, we are currently in a relative period of calm," John Paitek, vice president, GEP, said in a release. "But it is very much the calm before the coming storm. This report provides procurement and supply chain leaders with a prescriptive guide to weathering the gale force headwinds of protectionism, tariffs, trade wars, regulatory pressures, uncertainty, and the AI revolution that we will face in 2025."
A report from the company released today offers predictions and strategies for the upcoming year, organized into six major predictions in GEP’s “Outlook 2025: Procurement & Supply Chain” report.
Advanced AI agents will play a key role in demand forecasting, risk monitoring, and supply chain optimization, shifting procurement's mandate from tactical to strategic. Companies should invest in the technology now to to streamline processes and enhance decision-making.
Expanded value metrics will drive decisions, as success will be measured by resilience, sustainability, and compliance… not just cost efficiency. Companies should communicate value beyond cost savings to stakeholders, and develop new KPIs.
Increasing regulatory demands will necessitate heightened supply chain transparency and accountability. So companies should strengthen supplier audits, adopt ESG tracking tools, and integrate compliance into strategic procurement decisions.
Widening tariffs and trade restrictions will force companies to reassess total cost of ownership (TCO) metrics to include geopolitical and environmental risks, as nearshoring and friendshoring attempt to balance resilience with cost.
Rising energy costs and regulatory demands will accelerate the shift to sustainable operations, pushing companies to invest in renewable energy and redesign supply chains to align with ESG commitments.
New tariffs could drive prices higher, just as inflation has come under control and interest rates are returning to near-zero levels. That means companies must continue to secure cost savings as their primary responsibility.
Freight transportation sector analysts with US Bank say they expect change on the horizon in that market for 2025, due to possible tariffs imposed by a new White House administration, the return of East and Gulf coast port strikes, and expanding freight fraud.
“All three of these merit scrutiny, and that is our promise as we roll into the new year,” the company said in a statement today.
First, US Bank said a new administration will occupy the White House and will control the House and Senate for the first time since 2016. With an announced mandate on tariffs, taxes and trade from his electoral victory, President-Elect Trump’s anticipated actions are almost certain to impact the supply chain, the bank said.
Second, a strike by longshoreman at East Coast and Gulf ports was suspended in October, but the can was only kicked until mid-January. Shipper alarm bells are already ringing, and with peak season in full swing, the West coast ports are roaring, having absorbed containers bound for the East. However, that status may not be sustainable in the event of a prolonged strike in January, US Bank said.
And third, analyst are tracking the proliferation of freight fraud, and its reverberations across the supply chain. No longer the realm of petty criminals, freight fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated, and the financial toll of their activities in the loss of goods, and data, is expected to be in the billions, the bank estimates.
Specifically, 48% of respondents identified rising tariffs and trade barriers as their top concern, followed by supply chain disruptions at 45% and geopolitical instability at 41%. Moreover, tariffs and trade barriers ranked as the priority issue regardless of company size, as respondents at companies with less than 250 employees, 251-500, 501-1,000, 1,001-50,000 and 50,000+ employees all cited it as the most significant issue they are currently facing.
“Evolving tariffs and trade policies are one of a number of complex issues requiring organizations to build more resilience into their supply chains through compliance, technology and strategic planning,” Jackson Wood, Director, Industry Strategy at Descartes, said in a release. “With the potential for the incoming U.S. administration to impose new and additional tariffs on a wide variety of goods and countries of origin, U.S. importers may need to significantly re-engineer their sourcing strategies to mitigate potentially higher costs.”
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.