Day: 8 March 2019

France-based international 3PL Geodis will open a new warehouse in Oberhausen this summer. The 40,000 square-meter building is being built by SEGRO, a UK industrial real estate group, with which Geodis has already implemented other major projects.

Geodis will hire up to 500 employees for the extensive warehousing and order picking operations in Oberhausen. The combination of a strong, available pool of skilled workers and an attractive logistic location with very good transportation connections make Oberhausen the ideal choice for this new location. In addition, the logistics centre will be implemented with an innovative warehouse concept that combines maximum space utilization with maximum productivity.

With this new opening, Geodis is continuing to expand its long-standing e-commerce strategy. In recent years, the company has significantly expanded its contract logistics business on a national and international level with well-known companies in this sector. With Oberhausen, a total of six of the 14 logistics centres operated by the company in Germany alone will specialize in e-commerce.

“We have been pursuing a very successful growth strategy in this market segment for years,” says Thomas Kraus, President & CEO North, East and Central Europe.

Italy’s Sitma Machinery has added its latest solution from its innovative e-cobots technology and the next evolution of the species for wrapping parcels in the e-commerce field: the Sitma e-Wrap, one of the most popular platforms designed by the Italian company. Originally created for Åland Post Ltd, a postal operator based in Northern Europe, today e-Wrap is presented in its most advanced 2.0 form, redesigned to respond to renewed needs for savings and efficiency in the logistics sector.

From postal operator to e-commerce specialist
Formed as a postal operator specializing in shipping newspapers and magazines, Åland Post Ltd gradually shifted its activity to focus on management of envelopes and parcels, becoming a true logistics operator in the field of e-commerce. This structural change meant needing to find more flexible packaging solutions, capable of handling products of different sizes and, at the same time, allowing savings on materials. Building on its experience in both the logistics and packaging sectors, Sitma worked together with Åland Post Ltdt to develop a tailor-made solution: the ‘e-Wrap packaging machine. The machine developed by the Italian company, characterized by the use of plastic film and variable formats, has been operating for over three years at the Aland Post headquarters, where it has showed excellent efficiency, flexibility and productivity.

The evolution of the species: e-Wrap 2.0
The e-Wrap proved to be a winning solution, able to respond to the needs arising from the boom in the e-commerce sector in Europe, but Sitma wanted to go further. Building on its experience in sorting processes, the company developed an evolved version of e-Wrap. The ‘2.0’ version, in addition to allowing packages of variable sizes to be packaged with different types of films, integrates and automates advanced processes, increasingly meeting the needs of efficiency, work management and cost saving experienced by companies active in the sector. In the e-Wrap 2.0 packaging machine’s operating concept, upstream the e-Cobots automatically pick up packages from the racks (drawers containing orders to be packaged and shipped) and, thanks to a special feeding system created by Sitma engineering, offers the possibility to take and apply paper inserts (such as invoices or other documents), integrating perfectly with the package without needing glue, thus ensuring significant savings in materials. The packaging machine operates in a vertical direction, guaranteeing wrapping with tailored film applied to packs of different sizes and shapes, quickly performing the various operations of cutting, welding, weighing and labeling. Finally, downstream in the process, the e-Wrap integrates perfectly with the sorting systems, Sitma’s flagship, which concludes the package management cycle from picking to final shipment.

EnerSys has launched its ODYSSEY Performance Series batteries for buses, trucks and other large commercial vehicles. Optimized to meet the high load demands of the modern automotive vehicle sector, the batteries offer a solution to fleet owners and operators who are facing a sharp rise in battery-related vehicle breakdowns.

Advanced Thin Plate Pure Lead (TPPL) technology enables unmatched battery performance improvements, providing unrivalled usable capacity, strength and life – to reliably power even the most demanding vehicles – along with an outstanding reduction in total cost of ownership.

Phil Arrowsmith, Director Specialty Market EMEA at EnerSys, commented: ‘The ODYSSEY Performance Series battery range is what modern transport and service vehicles have been waiting for. Tried and tested in the heavy-duty vehicle market for more than five years, these superior batteries harness the power of TPPL battery technology to deliver massive starting and endurance ability.’

Available in standard footprints for European heavy-duty vehicles, ODYSSEY Performance Series batteries comply with DIN B and DIN C size standards for Europe and the widely recognised – though no longer formally accepted – 629 and 625 references for the UK.

Today’s vehicle and driver systems are demanding ever-higher levels of performance, beyond anything conventional batteries were ever designed for. Existing batteries are therefore increasingly unable to handle vehicles’ growing electrical loads. A typical battery challenge is to support a ‘hotel load’ without the need to restart the engine, while retaining enough reserve power to reliably start the engine again the following morning – and to repeat this without fail throughout the battery’s operating life.