Considerations for Material Handling Equipment Acquisition
By Rob Cranford, material handling consultant at Element Fleet Management
There’s nothing cookie cutter about managing material handling equipment purchases.
Every warehouse and every operator is different. To identify the best solution for a particular organization, as a fleet manager you must put together various pieces of the material handling equipment puzzle. When it comes to acquiring material handling equipment, the following are key factors to consider:
Platooning: The Next Level to an Autonomous Fleet
Platooning, more formally known as driver assistive truck platooning, or DATP, could be the low-hanging fruit in taking driving to the next level.
Walter Sullivan, head of Elektrobit Automotive’s newly established Silicon Valley Innovation Lab, notes that platooning will be one of the first implementations of automated truck driving, due to the promise of greater fuel economy.
Pointing out that OEMs are happy to eke out a 3% reduction in fuel each model year, "When a vehicle is driving 200,000 miles a year, if you can save 10% on fuel, that's massive," he says.
Driveway Software, Inc. Raises $10M Funding, Aims to Conquer Mobile Telematics and Use Big Data to Disrupt The Insurance Industry
Big data and Mobile Telematics Company Driveway Software, Inc. has closed a $10 million funding round led by Ervington Investments, representing prominent Russian businessman Roman Abramovich. The funds will be used to further strengthen Driveway's position as the best in class telematics solution, create new markets for telematics solutions and grow the company's team by attracting the smartest minds in the industry.
"Since we launched five years ago, our smartphone app, Drivewise.ly, has collected over 500,000,000 miles and rewarded more than 250,000 drivers," said Igor Katsman, Founder of Driveway.
Car-Sharing Could Reduce Costs, Improve Efficiency of Cincinnati’s Vehicle Fleet
Now that Over-the-Rhine parking is at a premium, and the residential permit plan has been vetoed, the residents of OTR are going to have to find a way to share parking, or risk losing more of the historic neighborhood to parking lots and garages.
Sharing also presents an opportunity when it comes to modernizing the City of Cincinnati’s fleet of 2,149 vehicles.
Mayor John Cranley (D) received unanimous support for this year’s budget, which includes $110 million to make much-needed upgrades to the City’s fleet and roadways over the next six years.
UPS Halfway to Driving 1 Billion Miles With Clean Fuel Fleet By 2017
UPS logged 154 million miles in 2014 toward its goal of driving 1 billion miles with its alternative fuel and advanced technology fleet by the end of 2017 — an almost threefold increase from 2013, according to the company’s 13th annual Sustainability Report.
To put this into perspective: it took 13 years for the company to drive the first 350 million miles with its alternative fuel and advanced technology fleet, but in just one year UPS was able to build dramatically on that number and is now more than halfway to its 2017 goal.
