Container tech company BISON this week launched the C-Lift P32, a new portable container lift system that equips shipping, logistics, and military operators to lift containers in any location. Recognising that conventional container handling equipment is typically big, heavy and expensive, BISON has developed a compact, portable and more economic alternative aimed at extending the benefits of intermodal logistics to new frontiers. The P32 is easily transported between sites, sets up in minutes and allows containers of all sizes and weights up to 32 tonne (70,000 lb) to be lifted on and off trailers safely and efficiently. Greg Fahey, BISON’s CEO, said:

“A big challenge if you want to lift containers outside of a freight hub is finding suitable equipment to do the job. So often, the size or weight of the container, space restrictions on site, or simply a lack of suitable equipment in the area, mean that cargo movements are compromised or costs are unreasonably high.”

BISON developed the P32 to solve this problem and sees the P32 as opening up a range of new possibilities for container freight and logistics. Users will be able to lift and ground containers more economically in factories or warehouses. This can allow container stuffing or unloading in better locations and ease the pressure of live loading and chassis detention costs.

Customers in remote locations, such as military, aid and project logistics operators can use the P32 to get containers in and out of remote locations more easily, avoiding reliance on local infrastructure. BISON is also fielding interest from construction and removals firms, wanting a mobile solution for delivering and collecting full containers at construction and urban sites.

A key part of the P32 design is BISON’s patent pending lift and lock mechanism, which reduces the size of the hydraulic system considerably, but still enables heavy containers to be elevated 1.65 metres off the ground. This in turn reduces the size, weight and cost of the system. Fahey continued: “The novelty of the P32 is its unique combination of portability, lift capacity and price. In these respects, it’s a world first for container handling equipment.”

The new product is the latest from BISON who’s container sales are now in use in over 25 countries. Notable customers include NASA, the US Airforce, Virgin Galactic and Emirates Team New Zealand.

BISON will be showcasing its newly developed C-Lift P32 at the IANA Intermodal EXPO in California and ntermodal Europe in Amsterdam this year.

| A  Handy Shipping Guide release  ||  August 11,  2017   |||

Sydney-based logistics software provider WiseTech Global has acquired Digerati, a provider of tariff research and compliance tools utilised by the Australasian customs broking community.

Digerati provides its compliance solutions to over 140 corporations including DHL, Expeditors, FedEx, Panalpina, Schenker, UPS, Yusen and many major brokerage and logistics houses in Australia and New Zealand.

“Border compliance is a complex, high-risk process with growing transaction volumes, speed and complexity exponentially increasing risk and potential penalties,” said Richard White, CEO, WiseTech Global.

“We envision a future of deeply capable, integrated and guided transaction processing that will reduce risks for customs brokers, importers and exporters by significantly reducing compliance breaches, fines and penalties and create a safer global trade environment.

“WiseTech Global has been investing research and development resources into machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation and decision support, all of which must be driven by large volume transaction data and deep learning around vast border agency data sets, compliance, due diligence and risk assessment and mitigation.

“We will be utilising the Digerati data set and customer experiences in our development pipeline for the next generation of border compliance, aimed at substantially increasing timely, accurate and complete customs entries for our customers, to better manage the exponential increase in transactions at the border.

“With the advent of global border initiatives such as Trade Single Window, Trusted Trader, Known Shipper, C-TPAT, AEO and Supply Chain Security and an ever-increasing critical need to secure borders and ensure that international trade is both safe and efficient, the work we are doing is vital to the next generation of cross-border compliance.”

Dr Pandey, Managing Director, OzDocs, added, “With the Digerati data set as part of WiseTech’s deep development capability, the compliance tools available to customers to reduce errors, improve compliance and better address risk at the border will clearly expand over time.”

|  A  Logistics & Materials Handling release  || August 10, 2017   |||

Management at one of McCain Foods’ processing plants in Timaru, New Zealand, has found over 100 opportunities for improvement in its logistics following a two day “energy blitz” from employees.

Production Manager Sonny Quilliam explains the thinking behind the move, with energy efficiency being key to the facility’s operations. “We’d picked all the low hanging fruit through previous work but we needed ideas to generate more energy and water saving opportunities. We knew they were there but we needed to shine a light on possibilities.”

Twenty people from all areas of the facility that produces 146,000 tonnes of chips annually took part, from management to factory floor workers. The team scoured every area of the plant, resulting in a spreadsheet of 113 viable ideas designed to improve logistical efficiency.

Ideas at the top of this list include the optimisation of refrigeration systems, recycling heated water and fixing general leaks.

“Completing the prioritised projects will reduce energy and water use and save thousands of dollars a year,” Quilliam continued. “This frees up energy and water for the local community and allows us greater freedom to invest back in the business.”

Research exercises like this can be greatly beneficial to businesses, with the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority quoting that firms can save up to 20% on energy costs with smarter energy use.

| A  Supply Chain Digital release  ||  August 7,  2017   |||

Yusen Logistics (Australia) Pty. Ltd., has commenced ocean and air freight forwarding operations to and from New Zealand servicing our global network and partners. We initially commenced in late 2016 servicing business customers to and from Australia and now offer global coverage that includes sophisticated logistics services across the entire supply chain.

In March 2016, we acquired Hitech Asia Pacific, a company that owned bases in Australia and New Zealand and focused on the transportation of sensitive and specialty projects. This marked our first step into New Zealand’s domestic logistics market. The expansion with these services has therefore enabled us to provide our New Zealand customers with a supply chain logistics service that now also caters and utilizes our global network.

Our new facility site is located near Auckland Airport and offers a full range of integrated supply chain solutions, including air and ocean freight services, land transportation, customs clearance and contract logistics and transport services including sensitive freight capabilities. Ocean freight forwarding is mostly to and from the Port of Auckland, which is New Zealand’s primary port; though we have coverage with all New Zealand Ports, Air freight forwarding also takes place to and from the country’s major airports, including Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch Airports. At the same time, we have established logistics facilities that will enable us to provide contract logistics services suited to our customers’ needs.

Establishing our own operations in New Zealand was ultimately essential to increase our global network and office coverage. Our aim was increase our in-market customer contact with New Zealand customers and provide them with not only various global tradelanes but also various specialty industries like Retail, Healthcare, Automotive, Technology, Aerospace to name a few key business verticals.

We are very excited with our future in New Zealand and will continue to look to enhance our array of services to compliment the Yusen Logistics global network.

| A Yusen Logistics release  ||  August 7,  2017   |||

The New Zealand Defence Force has signed a multi-year contract with forwarder Kuehne + Nagel.

Under the agreement, the forwarder will be the global supplier of domestic and international freight forwarding and customs services to the Defence Force, which consists of the Royal New Zealand Navy, the New Zealand Army and the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

The scope includes specialised services such as aircraft support incorporating aircraft-on-ground and engine movements.

Kuehne + Nagel has set-up a ‘control tower’ with a dedicated team of experts in key locations to ensure continuity of supply and real-time visibility and online tracking tools to monitor cargo movements.

The Defence Force’s joint support component commander, Colonel Ruth Putze, said: "The movement of freight in support of domestic and international operations is critical to our business. We are therefore very happy to be working with Kuehne + Nagel as a highly qualified and professional service provider."

The forwarder’s New Zealand managing director, Michael Aldwell, added: "We are delighted to partner with the New Zealand Defence Force as their exclusive supplier for freight forwarding services and look forward to delivering customer excellence by drawing on our global expertise in government and defence logistics as well as aid & relief operations."

| An AirCargo release  ||  August 1,  2017   |||

Logistics company DHL Supply Chain is staging an augmented reality trial with one of its Australian customers as it assesses the productivity benefits that AR can deliver to warehouse operations.

The project, using smart glasses to aid ‘picking’ during order fulfillment, builds on a series of pilots the company has run in a number of other countries, according to Andrew Weyer, DHL Supply Chain vice president, information technology, Australia & New Zealand.

The decision to invest in AR is based on DHL Supply Chain’s assessment of the emerging technologies that comprise ‘Industry 4.0’, Weyer said.

DHL Supply Chain develops its own internal ‘hype cycle’ that assesses the trends likely to have the biggest impact on its business and then works with its vendors and customers in co-creation efforts to develop proof of concepts, he said.

In 2014, DHL Trend Research released a paper — Augmented Reality in Logistics — that identified potential AR use cases in three key areas across the logistics industry:

• Warehousing operations, including pick by vision and warehouse planning.

• Transportation optimisation, including ‘completeness checks’ (ensuring a pick-up load is complete), complying with international import and export regulations (easily assessing trade documentation for example), dynamic rerouting (sending new directions to a driver to optimise travel), and freight loading.

• Last-mile delivery (areas such as parcel loading and drop-off, last-metre navigation, and using augmented reality to boost delivery security through customer recognition).

For the company’s first major foray into AR it partnered with a customer — printer vendor Ricoh — and software company Ubimax.

The 2015 project used Google Glass and Vuzix headsets and involved a Ricoh warehouse in the Netherlands.

“It was a joint decision between us and Ricoh to say, ‘Let’s identify a new digital trend that we can bring into the facility and try to prove some benefits’,” Weyer said

The three-week pilot involved 10 staff equipped with head-mounted displays. During the pilot, they collectively picked more than 20,000 items and fulfilled 9000 orders.

The benefits were substantial, with the augmented reality headsets delivering a greater than 25 per cent productivity boost.

X, the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet and the new custodian of Glass, earlier this month announced the relaunch of the headset with a focus on the enterprise; DHL is one of the Glass customers X has highlighted.

In the wake of the Netherlands pilot, in August last year DHL Supply Chain announced it would expand the AR program across different industries and stage further trials in the Netherlands, the US and the UK.

“This is one of the things we do in the group: We prove something in one area, then we industrialise it and we try to extend it to other areas and leverage it as a standard solution,” Weyer said.

The scenario where AR has been found to deliver the most significant boost is where an individual warehouse worker is fulfilling multiple orders and making ‘less than carton’ picks, Weyer said.

Difficulty with obtaining Google Glass units in APAC has meant that in this region DHL has partnered with US technology company Vuzix. (Vuzix’s M100 and M300 smart glasses run on Google’s Android mobile platform.)

DHL Supply Chain has already staged a proof of concept in Japan with a major retail customer, Weyer said.“There were some challenges with the POC around the technology,” he said. One of them was the impact of latency between the server and the glasses units being used on the warehouse floor.

“Those problems have since been solved and we’re now looking at a circa 10 per cent productivity improvement from the glasses,” he said.

In Australia, DHL Supply Chain has kicked off a proof of concept with Canon.

“We’ve identified an area of their operations where they’re doing a multiple picking-type operation. We then looked at the [AR] solution and identified two areas we could optimise even further,” Weyer said.

Changes to the AR software have meant that the heads-up display is “more dynamic,” he said: “It automatically fits to the number of trolleys that you’re actually picking into.”

The other enhancement was that in addition to highlighting the container in which a worker should place the current item, a different colour is used to highlight the next tote box — meaning that in the case of any minor system latency, the employee is able to keep working.

The local project is entering user acceptance testing this week.

The Australian pilot will see vision picking directly compared against a manual picking operation, voice picking and RF picking to better assess the productivity improvements that AR can deliver.

The smart glass units will be directly connected to wireless networks in the warehouse operated by DHL Supply Chain.

In most of DHL Supply Chain’s facilities across Asia Pacific the company has already installed standard wireless access points to drive RF-based picking, Weyer explained.

RF picking involves equipping warehouse workers with wearable Wi-Fi-connected terminals that can direct them to the appropriate area of a facility and tell them the item and quantity needed to fulfil an order. The technology has proven particularly important in the pharmaceutical area, Weyer said.

“We’ve got quite a large life science and healthcare operation across a lot of the countries in APAC, especially in Australia,” Weyer explained. In Australia the company does about 80 per cent of the direct to pharmacy distribution of life science and health-care products, he added.

“That RF capability allows us to be more accurate. You’re dealing with patients’ lives: You need to make sure you’re picking the right batch, the right expiry date. You don’t want someone mistaking an R for a 1 or a zero for an O — because you’ve just mixed up a batch number. If I need to do a recall, I need to know where I can find that product; if I’m not using RF and I introduce human error.”

Weyer said that one benefit of the facility chosen for the AR pilot is that it’s managed by an operations maturity standard used globally by DHL Supply Chain. That means that a range of measures to assess warehouse productivity are already in place.

“That operations maturity standard introduces a whole lot of disciplines around the operation; kicking off with things like early morning performance dialogues — what do we need to achieve for the day, what are our KPIs, what are our SLAs, planning the resource allocations to different activities,” he said.

“We’ve got daily reporting on the current productivity and we’ve got daily dashboards that are running. As we put those different technologies in, we can actively understand the impact of them off the base that we’ve already got in place.”

| A DHL release  ||  July 25,  2017   |||

New Zealand is a long way from the rest of the world. It takes three to four hours to fly from Auckland to the big eastern Australian cities; over half a day to reach the US West Coast or Southeast Asia; and most of a day to reach Europe.

Our geographic isolation has advantages – for instance, it’s easier to manage biosecurity controls to protect our local environment and agricultural exports – but also many economic costs. As the gravity model of trade predicts, countries that are further away from each other tend to trade less. In other words, our distance means that we aren’t selling as many goods and services to Europeans, Asians, Americans, and other people in general as we could, given New Zealanders’ relatively high skill and education levels, propensity to innovate given the right incentives, and generally reasonable policy settings. And, equally, we’re not buying as much from them as we could.

There are two reasons why this is a bad thing for our living standards:

First, exporting less means that there are fewer opportunities for New Zealand companies to ‘scale up’, which limits their productivity and their ability to successfully innovate. Result: Lower levels of economic productivity and lower incomes. Second, importing less means that many New Zealand businesses operate in ‘niches’ with little competition, which limits the pressure they face to lower prices or improve processes. Result: Higher prices that reduce what we can buy with our lower incomes.

We can’t do much about the physical distance – although . . .

|  Continue reading the full article with images and supporting material on Greater Auckland  ||  July 12,  2017   |||

Ports of Auckland has beaten out competitors from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific to be crowned Best Seaport in Oceania for the second year running.

The port was voted into the finals by customers and industry peers at the Asia Cargo News’ Asian Freight, Logistics and Supply Chain (AFLAS) Awards; the only New Zealand port to be selected as a finalist amongst three Australian ports (Port of Melbourne, Port of Brisbane and Sydney Ports).

“I am so proud to accept the award as the best port in our region on behalf of our team. It is a fantastic achievement for Ports of Auckland and testament to the hard-working people that keep our port running 24/7. We have a world-class group of people working here, doing their best for our customers and Aucklanders” said Ports of Auckland Chief Executive Tony Gibson.

The awards recognise leading air and shipping lines, air and sea ports, logistics providers and other industry professionals. Ports of Auckland was the first recipient of the ‘Best Seaport in Oceania’ award when the category was introduced in 2016, and the only recipient in this category to date.

This year, thousands of Asia Cargo News readers cast votes across award categories such as Best Seaport, Best Container Terminal and Best Airport. Asia Cargo News reported votes in the thousands – a record number of votes were submitted this year.

|  A POL release  ||  June 30,  2017  |||

Materials handling specialist, Hiab Australia, has launched three new cranes as well as a new Moffett M4NX truck-mounted forklift.

The new X-HiPro 232 sat at the Hiab stand alongside two other new X-HiPro mid-range cranes, the smaller X-HiPro 162 with a 15.1m extension and the series' big brother, the X-HiPro 302, which boasts a full outreach of 21m.

The new Hiab T160, a stiff-boom crane that is classed as a 15.5tm crane with a maximum lift capacity of 6500Kg is an integrated hoist that lifts straight up rather than in an arc, making it ideal for precision lifting over walls or lowering into pits.

Among all the shiny new machinery that was launched at the show, its interactive displays also garnered significant attention with a CTC simulator and its virtual reality head-mounted HiVision concept.

| Source: Trailer Magazine  ||  July 5,  2017   |||

The Waikato-Tainui owned Ruakura inland port development has taken a major step forward with the announcement today of a joint venture partnership with a world-class port operator.

The tribe’s commercial company Tainui Group Holdings (TGH) and LINX Cargo Care Group have joined forces to develop and operate the new port, which is currently under construction and expected to bring significant economic return to Waikato-Tainui and the region.

LINX Cargo Care Group and one of its subsidiaries, C3 Limited, New Zealand’s largest on-wharf logistics company, are owned by a Brookfield Consortium which brings together global experience in port operations and infrastructure development.

Rukumoana Schaafhausen, Chairman of the tribe’s executive committee Te Arataura, welcomed LINX Cargo Care Group to the Waikato-Tainui whaanau and acknowledged their mutual commitment to long-term investment.

“Waikato-Tainui is an inter-generational investor. What we achieve today will reverberate for generations of our mokopuna. LINX brings not only significant expertise in port development and operation but also a long-term vision that matches our view of the positive environmental, social and economic advantages that must and will come from this project,” she said.

TGH Chief Executive Chris Joblin said the conditional agreement reached this week will bring the full force of LINX Cargo Care Group’s world class experience to bear at Ruakura through a new joint venture to develop and operate the port.

“We are delighted to confirm this agreement with LINX Cargo Care Group following a comprehensive RFP process over the past ten months which attracted expressions of interest from seven potential port operators,” Mr Joblin said.

“LINX and C3 share our long-term vision to help transform North Island freight flows, driving new levels of productivity, efficiency and speed to market for the rapidly growing export and import community in the golden triangle of Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga,” he said.

The 50/50 joint venture of TGH and LINX Cargo Care Group will take an initial 30 year lease on the inland port land at Ruakura, subject to the OIO (Overseas Investment Office) approval for the participation of LINX Cargo Care Group which operates extensively across Australia and New Zealand.

Waikato-Tainui will continue to own the land on which the Ruakura Inland Port is built, and benefit from ground lease payments for its use.

Anthony Jones, Group CEO for LINX Cargo Care Group and Chairman of C3 said the transformative nature of Ruakura was a major attraction.

“Ruakura will be transformational for the New Zealand logistical supply chain. It will offer stable, efficient and cost effective networks for importers and exporters to grow with confidence in the future. We are extremely excited to be part of this project for New Zealand’s North Island communities, which will deliver long-term benefits such as safer roads, employment opportunities and reliable inland transport networks,” he said.

In addition to the range of services Ruakura will provide to the region’s exporters and importers, it has the potential to support 6,000-12,000 jobs within the precinct once fully-built.

 A Maori Television Online News Team release |  June 28, 2017  |||