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The outbreak of the COVID pandemic has created chaos over the past two years. But some of the after-effects continue to linger for the economy. Looking to the months ahead, addressing these lingering risks will be critical for the U.S. economy—and the outlook for material handling.

The MHI community entered the new year mourning the death of Jim Galante, a leading expert in ergonomics whose distinguished career in the material-handling industry spanned more than five decades. Galante, 76, died unexpectedly at his home in Falmouth, Maine, on Dec. 22.

When people ask Lauren Ziccardi what she does for a living, she half-jokingly says that she “helps people move boxes.” But in reality, being vice president of solutions development at MHI member inVia Robotics is a lot more complicated than that.

The Conveyor and Sortation Systems (CSS) Industry Group of MHI is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022.

MHI Solutions Community Software Subcommittee Will Help MHI Members Identify Software Solutions and Share Best Practices BY CHRISTIAN DOW, MHI EXECUTIVE VP OF MEMBERSHIP AND INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP In high school, they were sometimes called “software nerds” or “tech geeks,” but in the modern supply chain industry, software experts just might be the coolest kids in class. The digitization and automation ...

Solutions Spotlight BY KATIE KUEHNER-HEBERT Sustainability within the supply chain is a hot topic these days across all industries—and very much on the minds of the members of the MHI Industry Group, Rack Manufacturing Institute Inc. For RMI members, the focus is not only on the environmental aspects of sustainability, but also on the social aspects: How to operate in ...

Safer Handling BY TOM GRESHAM Operators of factories and warehouses increasingly are seeking to integrate industrial lift devices with other components of their spaces. No longer do lifts operate in relative isolation. In that way, lifts are “a piece of the overall machine now,” said James Johnston, director of engineering at MHI member Autoquip and chair of Lift Manufacturers Product ...

Product Spotlight BY MICHAEL SENECAL The key to understanding sustainability in any industry is understanding the direct relationship between efficiency and the environment—improvements in one also mean improvements in the other. As enterprises with material handling needs strive to become more productive and efficient, they turn to members of MHI’s Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS) Industry Group for tools ...

Economic Market Analysis BY JASON SCHENKER, PRESTIGE ECONOMICS To say that 2021 was a strong year for U.S. and global economic growth would be quite an understatement. Coming out of the 2020 COVID-19 recession, growth in 2021 reflected a massive rebound as stimulative fiscal policies and accommodative monetary policies pushed the U.S. economy to post some of the strongest real ...

Where Are They Now? Catching up with an MHEFI Scholarship Recipient JOSH LINE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Before beginning his career, Josh Line had been on an airplane only once and rarely strayed far from his home state of Pennsylvania. A native of Carlisle, he went to the University of Pittsburgh, a three-hour drive west, and fell in love with the ...