Views and Comment from ProMat Chicago
18th March 2025
Logistics Business’ man in Chicago, Ian Wright, spoke to two CEOs of exhibiting companies at ProMat to take the American materials handling pulse.
Robert McKeel (pictured above), CEO of FORTNA, told Ian: “We continue to grow. We have we’ve grown the business very rapidly from 2020, to today. We’d like to continue that. We think the market still has double digit growth potential over the long term. Obviously, there’s some short term dynamics with the markets that our whole industry is dealing with, in that we’ve looked at ways that we can expand our offerings to customers to meet different needs. So a big focus coming into this year was what I’m gonna call brownfield opportunities. How do we go into existing distribution centres and add more capability for customers so they can get more out of the assets they already own.
“Our partnerships with Packsize and Sitma were one of those initiatives to help go look at their packaging operations, save them transportation costs or increase their throughput through automated packaging. As one example of that, we’ve created some robotic solutions, ‘opti sweep’, that we announced at ProMat two years ago. We’re rolling that out as another brownfield solution to help upgrade, you know, maybe old bomb-bay sorters or tilt tray sorters with robotics and automation to get more throughput.
“So I’ll call, broadly, those asset improvement initiatives to get more utilization and existing assets, and then we’re still looking at new distribution centres for our customers. And largely we’re seeing opportunities around what I’ll call flexible automation, which is the robotic systems like AutoStore or HAI, plus our partners. And in those customers can make shorter term investments because the solutions are flexible, and it’s easy to add on additional storage or additional robots for throughput or capacity, and because of that, you don’t need to create a 10-year business case, you can create a three-year business case and then add on and expand so you don’t put all your money in day one. You can add on your money over time. So those kind of things to help people in a more uncertain environment still invest in the capabilities that they need.”
Jim Ryan, Sentry
We asked Jim Ryan, CEO and Founder of Sentry Protection Products, to tell us a little bit about the new product offering – the configurator – that is brand new for ProMat.
“Well, and going back to how the new product works, and the fact that we can now cover every size column with a combination of three different pieces. Then the challenge for our customers is, okay, how do I put the right pieces in the right places? So what we’ve created and put onto our website is a configurator that simply means that you are able to place into this configurator, the number of columns, the size of the column, the shape of the column. And it automatically, not only calculates how many parts and pieces you do, but it draws you a picture showing how that goes together, and it gives you the results at the bottom. So if you happen to have 20 columns that need a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it automatically puts a list of the items that you need together. It can even quote them, and gives you the results so that it’s not guesswork. You know exactly what you need to cover the columns and the number of columns that you need. Currently, it’s available to our reseller network, but we are very shortly going to put it on to our main website for anyone to be able to do that.”
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