John Powers says he knows a lot about vertical reciprocating conveyors. In fact he recently issued a press release to make that message loud and clear. The press release may have gone out under his company’s logo, Century Elevator Co., of Quincy, Mass., but you could almost hear him say: “I’ve installed and repaired hundreds of VRCs over the years. I intend to add to that record with yours.”

He didn’t say that, but his press release did say this:

“Many building owners, facilities managers and operations people aren’t aware of the law passed in April 2009 that gave the [Massachusetts] Board of Elevator Regulations and Department of Public Safety jurisdiction over the installation, maintenance, repair and inspection of VRCs. … Powers says the new regulations dictate that a permit must be obtained from the Department of Public Safety prior to the installation of any new VRC or modification to an existing one. As with all other elevators, VRCs must now be inspected annually by a state elevator inspector, and a licensed structural engineer must verify conformance with state building codes.”

The Elevator Gang is back, and it looks like they’ve captured Massachusetts. For years, this magazine’s former editor, Bernie Knill, made it his mission to shine the light of truth on what these people were up to: to hijack a lucrative piece of business away from the material handling industry. Let’s be clear: VRCs handle MATERIAL—not PEOPLE. Hence VRCs are NOT elevators as defined under ASME A17.1 – Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators. VRCs have their own guidelines: ASME B20.1 – Safety Standard for Conveyors & Related Equipment .

There are cases where elevators have been converted to material lifts and are therefore covered under ASME A17.1 as “Material Lift Type A.” Here’s that definition: “a hoisting and lowering mechanism normally classified as an elevator . . . serving two or more landings for the purpose of transporting material. On Type A material lifts no persons are permitted to ride”.

Many elevator inspectors have been confused by this and saw VRCs as fair game, leading to cases where VRCs were incorrectly considered to be A17.1 Material Lifts. Here’s what these people fail to understand: VRCs were made to be VRCs by companies in the MATERIAL handling industry. They were never intended to carry people, therefore they were manufactured to satisfy the less stringent and costly industrial standards of ASME B20.1.

In fact, as MHIA has clearly pointed out, “The A17 code specifically and expressly excludes all B20 conveyors – which include VRCs – from the scope of equipment intended to be covered by that code (section 1.1.2(g)).”

MHIA concludes: “Applying ASME A17.1Material Lift requirements to VRCs imposes unreasonable requirements on, creates unnecessary regulatory and administrative obstructions for, and places an additional financial burden on the end user of the equipment.”

MHIA has been stating and restating this for the past 10 years, most recently last year with the update of “Application Guidelines for Vertical Reciprocating Conveyors.” Now, a half-a-year after this publication’s release, Mr. Powers of Century Elevator issues his press release, with the apparent blessing of the Massachusetts Elevator Gang, and now not even worrying about the key distinction that has always protected VRC users from these people. The press release comes out and says it:

“VRCs can be designed to move things (not people!) from one pound to 200,000 pounds between levels in multiple story buildings.”

I love the exclamation mark they added for emphasis!

The VRC industry isn’t giving up their fight against unreasonable regulations. I spoke with Tom Archie, special projects manager at PFlow Industries, makers of VRCs. He told me the International Union of Elevator Constructors wants to get each state to adopt a licensing requirement for elevator installers and to slip VRCs into that pool of equipment that only licensed elevator mechanics can install. The VRC industry is convinced that goes counter to a Supreme Court ruling stating that although a state can license almost any activity within its boundaries, a licensing requirement has to bear rational relationship to the work being licensed. And it’s the VRC Industry’s contention that it’s not rational to require VRC mechanics to learn and be licensed on equipment they never install.

Archie also told me that his industry has written an amendment with the approval of the Massachusetts Dept. of Public Safety, which oversees the licensing requirements, and he’s hopeful this amendment will be introduced and passed during the new legislative session this year.

Meanwhile, Century Elevator’s Mr. Powers wants you VRC users and potential users to remember something:

“‘To ensure the right VRC for your job, and that it’s installed properly, always seek out an experienced team such as Century Elevator. We never let you down,’ Powers smiles.”

Yes, I’ll bet he smiled when he said that.

You would think automotive engineers are fans of all the sophisticated automation that helps them produce their products. But one Detroit-based Ford production line manager I know would take simple over sophisticated every time. I spoke with him for background while researching our Automotive Industry Report to appear in MH&L’s February issue. We got to speaking about his job—making transmissions—and the material handling systems that support his occupation.

Robots provide a lot of that support, but this engineer is more impressed by the engineering that went into the design of the wire baskets presenting transmission components to these robots than with the robots themselves. It took engineering artistry to design these baskets to suit the precision movements of the robots.

This engineer worked with Salco Engineering and Manufacturing of Jackson, Michigan, to redesign one of this vendor’s standard wire baskets so it could better interface with this Ford plant’s robots. The basket had to be precisely engineered so the robotic arm could pick up a part from the basket or place a part into it. Simple. But it represents the kind of problem-solving process that makes engineering one of the world’s most respected professions. Engineers are unsung heroes of the corporate bottom line. They often find savings their CEOs didn’t know were possible.

“Like they say in the restaurant industry, the money’s in the corners—the pots and pans,” this Ford engineer told me. “Little things can make you or break you. This basket design change was a great thing because you do it and don’t have to think about it for the next seven years. You never know how much money you might have spent trying to de-bug this handling problem. Salco made suggestions on size and orientation based on what they knew would and wouldn’t work.”

This guy loves things that stay fixed. That means he’s not in love with companies that constantly evolve their technology to the point of perpetual obsolescence. In fact his philosophy is that better can become the enemy of good.

“I need something good, reliable and long-term, and some technology companies are always making something better,” he added. “I don’t know if it’s because we’re Ford and they think we should always be getting something new and trying it out for the rest of the world.

If you’re thinking this guy sounds like a Luddite, let’s look at the definition:

“The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the nineteenth century who protested–often by destroying mechanized looms–against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life.”

It might be tempting to apply that label to this guy, considering the role labor unions play in the automotive industry. But if you’re a technology supplier, remember, this guy is your customer—as are many of the people who read this blog and respond to it. I welcome you and your customers to weigh in on what our friend from Ford had to say. Does his ode to an engineered basket resonate with you or does it belong in another kind of basket—a circular one?

One of the beautiful things about writing a blog is that it allows you to update previously written articles with some new information. For instance, the latest monthly column I write for the magazine (which you can read here) focuses on the value of a supply chain education, with far too many recent students believing that their instructors left much to be desired. Since I wrote that column, ChainLink Research, whose survey I referenced, has produced more findings about what exactly people are getting when they take a supply chain course.

When asked to identify “the most important supply chain-related educational needs for you and your organization over the next 12-18 months,” the respondents gave as their number one answer “supply chain strategy and leadership.” Unfortunately, that same category ranked at the very bottom when those same people were asked how well that need is being met educationally.

The pattern continues, with the second most important topic — supply chain risk management — being second from the bottom in terms of how well students feel they’re being educated on that topic. “Clearly, the community is crying out for better education in these crucial areas,” observes Bill McBeath, ChainLink Research’s chief research officer.

Supply chain educators appear to be very good at teaching basic logistics and transportation, but there’s something of a disconnect with their students, who are looking to develop more cross-functional skills rather than concentrating solely on the movement of goods. In the words of one survey respondent, “Transportation is growing in scale and complexity in most companies, and universities are only addressing fundamentals.” Higher-level discussions on such issues as transportation policy and economics are sought by students, sometimes in vain.

When it comes to auto-ID and traceability, students ranked that topic as the least important educational priority, and that seems to be the case among educators as well, as the number and quality of the programs on this topic ranked very low in the survey.

As I wrote in my book, Supply Chain Management Best Practices, “The number-one best practice when it comes to managing your supply chain is to have best-in-class people in positions of responsibility throughout your organization.” But finding these people isn’t always easy, especially when the talent recruitment process itself is being challenged by a perceived quality gap in the education process.

In the absence of any consensus about which universities offer the most complete supply chain education, we can defer to the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, which lists the top 10 undergraduate programs offering supply chain/logistics courses. Here’s the most recent list (from 2010):

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. Michigan State University

3. Pennsylvania State University

4. Arizona State University

5. Carnegie Mellon University

6. Ohio State University

7. Purdue University

8. University of Maryland

9. University of Tennessee

10. University of Michigan

We recently reported that Intermec intends to acquire Vocollect, Inc., providers of voice-centric solutions for mobile workers. After having a chance to talk to the principals involved in this transaction, the only thing surprising about it was why it didn’t happen sooner. According to Joe Pajer, CEO of Vocollect, his company’s technology is used in only about 10-15% of large warehouses (50,000 sq ft and above) with 20 pickers or more that have a WMS and a wireless system and do mostly case and piece picking. That’s a huge potential market.

The problem is, there still isn’t much awareness of voice technology in that market. Only about half of its inhabitants know much about it.

“Some 75% of people who were aware of voice were likely to purchase it,” Pajer told me. “So we need to get it accepted as a standard technology to be considered when redesigning any workflow in the warehouse. And the combinations of voice with scanning, screens and RFID is all important to be able to deliver on this technology because no two warehouses are the same.”

But the potential goes beyond warehousing, Earl Thompson added. As senior VP of mobility products for Intermec, he’s bound to think that way—although short-term his goal is to drive growth for both sides of the company in both warehouses and distribution centers.

“We see opportunities to voice enable a much richer set of devices,” he said.

Right now, the big story is solutions, not components. And until now data collection was very much a component-based technology. But now that bar coding, RFID and voice have matured, combining them on one handheld is a natural progression. And market players like LXE and Psion are bound to aim for the same customers. At the same time, these players have also been customers to both Intermec and Vocollect, so this market is in for some excitement.

Bert Moore, founder of IDAT Consulting and Education, is an ADC specialist and a member of MH&L’s editorial advisory board. He gave me another good reason for Intermec and Vocollect to continue dealing with LXE and Psion and those vendors’ customers:

“If they continue to license the technology to them it helps pay off their acquisition.”

There’s a unique set of words for you. But according to the latest trend in the food and grocery industry, this combination may not sound so funny in the near future. I just read an article in my local Plain Dealer that drug and retail chains are adding groceries to their offerings to bring in more business. Walgreens is said to be devoting up to 40 percent of the space in its redesigned stores to fresh and frozen foods.

One thing this article didn’t mention is how capable the staffs of these stores will be in safely handling perishable products. Could this be the cause of the next botulism scare in the food chain?

Jeff Heinen, the co-president of Heinen’s Fine Foods, a well-known and respected Cleveland-based grocery chain, was quoted as saying that the food industry may look simple on the surface, but it is pretty complex. “Stores who dabble in it or whose primary focus is selling clothes or nonfood items most likely do not care much about where their food comes from or handling perishable products properly.”

If that’s the case, the food supply chain could be endangered by some weak links. To get another read on this, I asked Timothy Pyne, vice president of the retail, consumer and food business at Tompkins Associates http://www.tompkinsinc.com/

for his perspective. I actually feel better that I did, because it sounds like retailers are being pretty careful about this move.

“Initially as they test the concept they’ll partner with a wholesale grocery operator to service the stores,” Pyne told me. “As the concept expands geographically and in volume they’ll start to bring on the internal expertise and develop their own network.”

So, by using a wholesaler in the initial stages of this trend, these purveyors of suits and soap will gradually become experts at sushi and salad. They’ll develop an internal perishable network with proper controls and they’ll train their material handlers on the safe handling of perishables.

In fact they’ll be required to be safe by law. They’ll have to live up to the Produce Traceability Initiative, in keeping with the Food and Safety Modernization Act. That means being able to trace every case of produce back to the grower if required to. (The pharma chain is dealing with its own set of safety issues, as the latest J&J Tylenol recall indicates.)

Ironically, rather than making the food chain more dangerous, Pyne believes these new links in the food chain might make it even stronger. Retailers can’t afford to narrow their profit margins any further by making dumb mistakes—especially where life and death are concerned.

If you’re my age—slightly over 50—you probably don’t drink much milk anymore. It tends to make us gassier than we are by nature. I HAVE cultivated a taste for almond milk in my cereal, though. My readers in the dairy supply chain won’t like that admission, but I’m not alone. If you exclude the people with digestive gas issues, there’s still a big population who have a problem with the dairy industry’s greenhouse gas (GHG) issues.

According to a recent United Nations Food and Agricultural Report, dairy production accounts for 4 percent of man-made GHG emissions. That adds up to over 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year.

Both sets of gas problems are causing the Dairy industry significant heartburn. But the GHG issue has reached such a pain point that the industry is doing something about it—and setting a great example for all supply chains while they’re at it.

The U.S. Dairy Industry just released a report on its efforts to combat GHG emissions. “The U.S. Dairy Sustainability Commitment Progress Report” comes from the Innovation Center for the U.S. Dairy Industry. It represents the efforts of more than 500 dairy stakeholders — including environmental, academic and scientific experts — to reduce the Dairy industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 11 percent by 2020. By doing so, the industry also expects to achieve $238 million in business value. These goals are tied to ten projects—two of which should hold great interest to this audience.

These two projects aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions tied to packaging and transporting dairy products. Here’s a fun fact: Eight percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with getting a gallon of milk from farm to table comes from transportation. Packaging represents another three and a half percent.

By 2020, this industry hopes to reduce GHG emissions associated with milk transportation by more than 542,000 metric tons and fuel costs by nearly $58 million. It expects trucker payback in about a year, depending on fuel cost and usage.

Tactics include changing driver behaviors and routes and reducing idling time. The industry is also working with EPA’s SmartWay program, which provides tools and resources for increasing fuel efficiency. Dairy processors and transportation providers will help the industry understand fuel savings achievable through their efficiency programs and their use of the SmartWay Program and electronic on-board recorders.

In turn, the industry will report best practices it has encountered. Take Oakhurst Dairy, for example. This family-owned company is northern New England’s largest independent dairy. Based in Portland, Maine, the dairy prides itself on environmental stewardship. Back in 2004 it was one of the first organizations to sign on to a voluntary State of Maine program for cutting GHG emissions. Its goal was a 20 percent reduction by 2010. By 2008, Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection and the Governor’s administration recognized Oakhurst for meeting part of its carbon reduction goal ahead of schedule. By then it had achieved a 12 percent reduction.

Oakhurst implemented rerouting software on its delivery fleet, reducing travel time and resulting in a savings of 88,000 gallons of diesel in the first year. The company also converted to biodiesel fuel, reducing CO2 by more than 1,332 metric tons every year.

Beyond transportation, this company installed 2,500 square feet of solar panels on the roof of its Portland headquarters and reduced consumption of heating oil by more than 7,500 gallons per year. Solar panels at one of Oakhurst’s distribution units reduced electrical usage by more than 15%.

Although I’m not a big cow-milk fan, I applaud the dairy industry for taking the bull by the horns and being a purveyor of better living through logistics.

“Silver bullet” is the worst pejorative you can use in describing a technology. It links any power that technology might have to superstition. We can thank marketers for much of the fiction written about science, but it doesn’t mean their products are science fiction; just overhyped.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology fell victim to the curse of the silver bullet a few years ago. The realities of costs and physics threatened to do it in. But thanks to people like Sue Hutchinson, RFID’s story is being transferred to the non-fiction section in the public mindset.

Sue is director of portfolio strategy at GS1 US, the organization responsible for writing the industry standards making real-world RFID applications possible. She told me recently that by getting away from the idea that RFID is the be-all and end-all solution for supply chains, and with the maturation of standards and taming of costs, the technology is starting to gain traction.

“The much better economics on the tags and readers is part of it, but with the standards being developed and stabilizing over the last few years we’re starting to see more in the way of whole solutions instead of components being sold,” she said. “We’re seeing more integration of the hardware and filtering software that links the read events to systems the users already have, be it an ERP system or a WMS or even point of sale.”

RFID is also influencing developments in machine vision systems. Instead of teaching cameras how to recognize things, with RFID, things are telling cameras what they are. As this takes off we’ll be seeing RFID readers integrated into more and more equipment used in warehousing and shipping—including lift trucks and pallet jacks. We’re already seeing developments in unmanned lift trucks equipped with robotic devices. Sue believes refrigerated environments will be the ideal application for this technology.

“Humans are another form of contaminant, so any time we can use a good combination of information technologies and good physical technology to minimize the human contact we have with fresh foods, that improves the quality of the goods,” she said. “The technology on the reader side is beefier and we keep getting smarter with antenna designs on the tags so they behave better in high moisture environments with frost and condensation. We’re also getting smarter about what the tags need to look like antenna-wise to be able to operate in those environments.”

This news should be pretty exciting to people in the food chain who have had their fill of silver-bullet talk when it comes to RFID. I just hope they’re not offended by being called a contaminant.

A headline in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention (which is what all good headlines should do): “How to Secure the Global Supply Chain.” Actually, it wasn’t so much the headline (which is quite close, actually, to a headline I wrote more than four years ago on the same topic) as it was the byline: Janet Napolitano, current head of the Department of Homeland Security. Okay, to be more precise, it wasn’t just the headline and the byline, as it was the timing of the article, coming as it did on the same day the WSJ’s front page story was about the changing of the guard in the U.S. House of Representatives. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody tried to draw attention to their accomplishments at a time when everybody was looking the opposite direction.

I don’t envy the Secretary her job, especially right now, when seemingly every story about the DHS typically has the words “pat-down” or “grope” somewhere in the text. So it’s understandable that she’d want to change the subject entirely and start talking about why the department was created in the first place: to secure and protect the global supply chain. So I’ll give her points for that.

Trouble is, her commentary leaves something to be desired; namely, a point. It would have been effective in the aftermath of 9/11, but in the year 2011, it’s kind of pointless to argue about the need for protecting the global supply chain. Isn’t that exactly why the DHS was formed, back in 2002? Also, Secretary Napolitano walks a rather thin line by reminding us about the Christmas 2009 attempted shoe-bombing, which pointed out some rather gaping holes in DHS’s procedures and left many people less-than-reassured about how safe it really was to travel.

The commentary then points to three things we need to do to strengthen the global supply chain (“we” seems to shift back and forth from the DHS to any company engaged in global commerce to any individual who travels internationally):

1. Prevent terrorists from exploiting the supply chain to plan and execute attacks.

2. Protect the most critical elements of the supply chain, especially infrastructure, from attack or disruption.

3. Make the global supply chain more resilient.

On point 1, I think we can all agree that the DHS has made some significant strides in that direction. Secretary Napolitano seems particularly proud of Project Global Shield (no doubt because it was launched on her watch), but she really should have mentioned C-TPAT and the Container Security Initiative and the SAFE Act and other accomplishments that were already in place when she arrived at DHS. Last time I checked, the global supply chain was non-partisan, and even if somebody else came up with the idea, why not trumpet the best-known successes of the department?

Point 2 addresses one of the chief stumbling blocks to protecting the global supply chain – establishing worldwide standards for screening technology – but doesn’t offer any timeline for how long this might take (years? decades? forever?) The recent attempt to blow up cargo aircraft from Yemen illustrates that the global supply chain is only as safe as its most corrupt link.

Secretary Napolitano’s final point sounds more like a wish than a strategy. How, exactly, will the DHS ensure that the global supply chain will be able to shrug off disruptions and bounce back quickly from attempted or successful attacks? If the answer is based on technology, the resiliency she’s wishing for could be long in coming. As I noted in my recent book (Supply Chain Managment Best Practices, 2nd edition), an effort to thwart security breaches at U.S. ports has been repeatedly delayed since 2002 and is not yet in place, primarily because the $250 million program relies on fingerprint identification technology that has yet to be developed. Seems to me that the DHS might want to add another goal to its “to-do” list: Follow through on projects. Otherwise we’ll keep hearing about how nice it’ll be to make the global supply chain more resilient, but won’t see much evidence of progress toward that goal.

In this “TMI” era, “Too Much Information” really becomes a problem if it’s collected via too many automatic platforms. Sometimes two is too many, especially if those platforms, like bar codes and radio frequency, conflict. That’s why industry is now demanding that there be commonality among these different forms of data collection, and GS1, the international standards making body, is mapping the way. Working with VDC Research, it put out a new whitepaper on this subject. It’s titled “Barcode & RFID Convergence: Enabling Greater Visibility,” and it explains why this is so critical:

“The ability to easily leverage information gathered from multiple systems and then port that information – in real-time – will open up the floodgates for analytics, dashboards and real-time alerting, driving the decision making processes down as low as it can possibly be driven. Just like RFID increases the value of barcode but needs to work with it to provide that value, new solutions will be faced with the same conundrum, thus furthering the requirement for a common architecture.”

RFID and bar codes are destined to share that architecture, but a data collection technology that’s not mentioned specifically in this white paper is voice. According to the authors of an article running in MH&L’s December issue, voice will become part of that convergence once certain technological and cost obstacles are worked out.

Authors Chris Sweeney and Dan Keller of Lucas Systems Inc. say once that happens a user will be directed to a pick location by voice and the user will trigger (hands-free, by voice) an RFID reader to read a tag on a product or location. These technologies combined in one unit will be stronger than any one of them by itself. Compared to bar code scanning, RFID is a true hands-free technology. Compared to voice, RFID reduces the potential for human error (reading a location check string but picking from an adjacent slot).

Another voice technology provider, Voxware, just became a private company to make it easier to drive these technologies toward such convergence. Voxware’s CEO Scott Yetter told me R&D investments are easier for private companies to make.

“We’re able to say, if I spend $10 on R&D now I’ll get $20 back in nine or 12 months, whereas under a public company structure if I spend $10 now if I don’t get it back I have to show a loss for that reporting period,” he said. “Now we can hire more developers and invest in new technology. Most of the applications we install today do something more than using voice. There’s also convergence at the network level—3g, 4g, wifi—so we’re looking at taking the technology outside the four walls, like on a truck.”

If convergence has brought automatic data collection technologies to a crossroads, transportation may take them further into a lot more markets.

The mainstream news media are discovering the contribution material handling and logistics technologies are making to the economy. During the holidays I heard a network news reporter credit (or blame) retailers’ increasing use of supply chain management software as the reason there are fewer after-Christmas bargains to be had. Looks like purchasing managers at the retail level are getting better at matching their supply to anticipated demand.

And last week’s Wall Street Journal showed how Crate & Barrel’s investment in Kiva robots has helped it avoid the need to quadruple staffing to match an equivalent rise in holiday business.

These are indicators that the curtain separating the inner workings of warehouses distribution centers from C-level decision makers is being lifted. The only problem I have with the coverage is it still tends to pit labor against technology. The WSJ story was titled “Holiday Hiring Call: People vs. Robots.” Looks like the next lesson that needs to be conveyed is that end users are not just playing “either/or” in applying technology to reduce labor. They’re also making better use of the workers they already employ. That’s part of the maturation process of becoming a lean organization.

For example, in a story on robotics that will appear in MH&L’s January issue, we’ll tell about the case of Otis Technology—a small company that wouldn’t have fit the profile of a robotics user only a few years ago. Since applying RMT Robotics’ “Adam” robotic vehicle, although it has helped them make material handling leaner, it hasn’t inspired the company to downsize its labor force. Instead, it is retraining the laborers who were pushing carts to do more value added work such as packaging.

“By retraining those individuals to do something more valuable, the volumes they can get out the door increase and the profit of the organization increases way beyond the investment in these little vehicles,” said Bill Torrens, director of sales and marketing for RMT.

It looks like robots are joining lift trucks in the business mainstream. Don’t be surprised if your local material handling equipment distributor starts adding them to its line of solutions. That WSJ article I cited gave a foreshadowing of that by noting that Kiva is testing a program to rent out robots seasonally to help retailers deal with holiday surges. I believe that kind of thing is called a harbinger. That would make a great robot name, wouldn’t it?