Month: April 2019

A Northamptonshire (UK) manufacturer and retailer of award-winning paper honeycomb pallets, pallet boxes, layer pads, and warehouse storage solutions has named its new CEO.

PALLITE®, based in Wellingborough, has welcomed Iain Hulmes to lead the business. The change sees Patrick Mulhall move to Commercial Director where he will strengthen the leadership and development of PALLITE®’s sales team, and together both will play key roles in continuing the company’s aggressive growth plans.

Hulmes is a degree-qualified mechanical engineer with an MBA from Manchester Business School who spent his formative years manufacturing plastics with ICI on Teesside. Subsequently, he’s held senior roles in a variety of industrial sectors including FMCG, recycling & minerals processing. More recently he was UK MD responsible for a £250M turnover minerals trading division of an industrial services PLC. Throughout his career, he has been heavily involved in the movement of raw materials and finished goods, and during the last three years he’s concentrated on helping SMEs to achieve rapid growth.

He said: ‘‘Last year sales grew by nearly 60%, and it’s been clear to me from day one that there is real momentum in the business. We have a great message on the environment, but we also have a range of products that deliver real bottom line benefits to customers.”

GEFCO Group has appointed experienced Director, Valérie Floridia, to support in the management of the GEFCO Innovation Factory. Launched in 2018, the internal incubator offers employees worldwide an opportunity to propose and develop innovative ideas to help drive GEFCO’s growth.

Floridia will reinforce GEFCO’s innovation team with her 15 years of experience at major industrial companies such as Renault and EDF in France, Germany and the United States. As Director of the GEFCO Innovation Factory, Valérie will be responsible for encouraging new ideas and helping convert them into fully operational projects that will strengthen the group’s expertise.

Created in 2018 to unleash internal creativity, the GEFCO Innovation Factory is open all year long, enabling candidates to submit their projects at any time to a screening committee of internal experts who select the most promising concepts. Shortlisted teams are then invited to Paris to pitch their innovative ideas at the Explorathon, a two-day event designed to challenge and accelerate projects with the potential to support the group’s business and drive growth.

Two Explorathon events were conducted over the past few months, where nine teams of GEFCO colleagues have explored innovative solutions on 3D printing, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.

Forklift truck safety assistance provider ELOKON has announced the opening of its new American subsidiary. ELOKON Inc. is based in Atlanta and represents the continuation of the international growth strategy for the supplier of assistance systems for industrial vehicles (forklifts, AGVs and Cobots) which is headquarted in Germany and operates subsidaries in Great Britain and Poland. ELOKON currently serves more than 3,000 customers in over 45 countries.

“The opening of our US subsidiary is an important milestone in our plans for international expansion,“ said Alexander Glasmacher, Managing Director of the ELOKON Group. “Having already achieved significant sales in America in 2018, we are now even better placed to meet our local customer requirements with our team here and to further expand our sales activities.“

The new subsidiary will be headed up by Kevin Bradley, who will become Vice President Sales and Operations. He was previously responsible for the subsidiary in Great Britain, from where he also served American customers.

The choice of location at Atlanta was based on a number of factors including good availability of highly trained specialists, internationally renowned universities, a dynamic economy, the world’s busiest passenger airport with daily direct connections to Europe, and a high density of subsidiaries of German SMEs. The ELOKON Inc. office is located in Tucker, GA, 30084, where a current team of ten staff provides front and back office service and support.

The company’s solutions include the multiple award winning driver assistance system ELOshield, collision-avoidance and personnel protection system ELOprotect, which was the FLTA Safety Award winner in 2018, and the smartphone based fleet management system ELOfleet.