Features

By Sheryl S. Jackson In the quest to improve productivity, decrease costs and enhance safety in the warehouse or distribution facility, owners and managers look to a variety of equipment, technology and training. There is, however, one area that usually does not top the list of actions considered essential for performance improvement. “Batteries and battery charging technology are often overlooked ...

Companies big and small continue to invest in emerging supply chain technologies in a major way. Blockchain along with radio frequency identification (RFID) asset-tracking technology, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and quick response (QR) codes are all technologies promising to provide transparency, efficiency and cost savings to players at each end of the supply chain and every ...

By Nicole Nelson Scott Shaw recalls a time in the not too distant past when he attempted to help a food manufacturer calculate an optimal scheduling scenario to grind grain. As the Clarkston Consulting senior consultant was well aware, the utilization of big hammer mills was extremely energy intensive, yet inevitable, as said grain served as the necessary basis—mixed with ...

By Sara Pearson Specter Today’s robotic solutions—both fixed and autonomous mobile robots—are increasingly being built as a platform upon which application-specific solutions can be built to handle unique manufacturing and warehousing tasks. But, in today’s highly dynamic, ever changing world, needs and strategies may likewise shift. Fortunately, due to their inherent flexibility and versatility, robots can be adapted to accommodate ...

By Nick Fortuna Modern supply chains are too complicated for any one company to do everything well, so strategic partnerships are key to solving the big problems facing the material handling industry and its customers. The right partnerships make business relationships more transparent, resilient and sustainable because customers get to work with best-of-breed providers working in their individual areas of ...

In these unprecedented times, supply chain solutions are more critical to business success than they have ever been. To answer this call, MHI created the ProMat Digital Experience (ProMatDX), a new digital event experience designed to power up manufacturing and supply chain professionals with critical access to the latest solutions they need now to improve the resiliency and agility of ...

By Maria Leggett COVID-19 forced everyone to experience what a rapid pivot required. The crisis gave visibility to the discrepancies between current and future skill sets of employees and the momentous task ahead preparing for the future of work. According to a recent McKinsey report, pre-COVID, 59% of company leaders prioritized building skill proficiencies. Post-COVID, that number changed to 78% ...

Merging these robotics and automated solutions with other digital technologies like IoT, AI, advanced analytics, AR/VR and cloud computing grows the resiliency firms need and builds in the visibility necessary to deliver on ever-changing consumer demands as well as mitigating future shocks. This issue of MHI Solutions tackles this important topic to help you answer these questions with best practices, ...

By John Paxton, CEO, MHI The pandemic has thrown many challenges into supply chains, and rarely have leaders faced such complex and changing conditions. What COVID-19 revealed is that many supply chains grew brittle in their decades-long quest for cost-savings while others that invested in emerging technologies and risk-planning proved to be agile and resilient enough to survive, and even ...

The organizations whose supply chains were aggressive about pre-pandemic investments in the digital technologies that enable them to serve e-commerce customers prove to be the most successful at weathering the coronavirus storm. By Carol Miller Expectations were low among financial analysts in the summer of 2020. Just prior to the release of second quarter results from multiple companies, predictions were ...