Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
As the floodwaters of Hurricane Florence continue to slowly recede from Wilmington, N.C., the online retailer Amazon.com Inc. has installed a pop-up pickup location that allows residents to receive parcel deliveries even if their homes are still isolated by storm damage.
Located in the parking lot of one of the e-commerce giant's local Whole Foods Market grocery stores, the site consists of an Amazon Prime delivery van, a temporary tent, and enough staff to handle the incoming packages holding important items for storm recovery, Seattle-based Amazon said.
In a video of the pickup location filmed by a local radio station, an Amazon employee explains that the site acts as a secure place to receive and store packages full of the items and essentials that storm survivors would not be able to access if their homes are still inaccessible.
The site is intended to operate for just two weeks—orders may be picked up until Oct. 14—and is designed to receive deliveries both for residents and for nonprofit disaster recovery agencies. "Our relief pickup location in Wilmington, N.C., is the latest example of our commitment to supporting our neighbors in immediate need in innovative and impactful ways," Amazon spokesperson Allison Flicker said in an email. "This first-of-its-kind temporary, relief pickup location serves as a convenient, efficient, and effective option for local customers and nonprofits looking for needed items and essentials in a community very much still recovering from Hurricane Florence."
In additional relief actions, the company has also deployed more than 30 trucks with more than 600,000 Amazon-donated disaster relief items, including bottles of water, food, supplies for children in shelters, and other essentials for those affected by the storm, Flicker said.
The pop-up delivery site is open only for products sold or fulfilled by Amazon, weighing less than 35 pounds, and meeting other restrictions, although Amazon said it charges no additional cost to use this site instead of the consumer's home address. The company also operates a permanent Amazon Locker location in the city, although that unit is often full to capacity, according to the company's website.
The retailer has coordinated its effort with disaster relief organizations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN), which is helping disaster response groups to coordinate the storage, transportation, and delivery of goods ranging from shovels, rakes, and gloves to carpet and drywall.
Even three weeks after Hurricane Florence made landfall, that flexible parcel delivery service is important because so many residents are still displaced from their damaged homes and living in shelters or other temporary housing, ALAN Executive Director Kathy Fulton said in an email. "Early on in the disaster—when roads are still flooded and power is still out—the issue is the ability to get deliveries to the address," Fulton said. "The primary issue at this point in the disaster is individuals and families that are still displaced due to damages to their residences. This solution allows them a secure place to receive packages."
Without a pop-up site like Amazon's Wilmington location, survivors are usually forced to rely on direct-to-store deliveries or to having parcels held at a UPS Inc. or FedEx Corp. location, although often those sites may be in industrial areas that are far from community centers, she said.
Indeed, that trend has caused a jump in the volume of direct-to-store deliveries in Wilmington. One area retailer that works with ALAN has recorded a rise in parcel traffic due to the number of families sending "care packages" to storm survivors by addressing online orders to Wilmington stores. In addition to that pattern, the retailer said that local shoppers immediately resumed using its online grocery order and pick-up services once that consumer channel had been restored after the storm, ALAN said.
However, much of the work involved in recovering from the hurricane has not yet begun, since residents cannot start the work of gutting soaked houses, disposing of wreckage, and rebuilding until they can safely return to their neighborhoods, according to ALAN.
Officials are just beginning to tally the extent of the storm's damage, although Port of Wilmington Executive Director Paul Cozza on Wednesday told the Wilmington Star-News that the port alone had sustained $50 million in damage, including warehouse walls sheared away, containers tossed about, and roof sections torn from buildings.
Supply chain planning (SCP) leaders working on transformation efforts are focused on two major high-impact technology trends, including composite AI and supply chain data governance, according to a study from Gartner, Inc.
"SCP leaders are in the process of developing transformation roadmaps that will prioritize delivering on advanced decision intelligence and automated decision making," Eva Dawkins, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, said in a release. "Composite AI, which is the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, will drive the optimization and automation of many planning activities at scale, while supply chain data governance is the foundational key for digital transformation.”
Their pursuit of those roadmaps is often complicated by frequent disruptions and the rapid pace of technological innovation. But Gartner says those leaders can accelerate the realized value of technology investments by facilitating a shift from IT-led to business-led digital leadership, with SCP leaders taking ownership of multidisciplinary teams to advance business operations, channels and products.
“A sound data governance strategy supports advanced technologies, such as composite AI, while also facilitating collaboration throughout the supply chain technology ecosystem,” said Dawkins. “Without attention to data governance, SCP leaders will likely struggle to achieve their expected ROI on key technology investments.”
The British logistics robot vendor Dexory this week said it has raised $80 million in venture funding to support an expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered features, grow its global team, and accelerate the deployment of its autonomous robots.
A “significant focus” continues to be on expanding across the U.S. market, where Dexory is live with customers in seven states and last month opened a U.S. headquarters in Nashville. The Series B will also enhance development and production facilities at its UK headquarters, the firm said.
The “series B” funding round was led by DTCP, with participation from Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and Bootstrap Europe, along with existing investors Atomico, Lakestar, Capnamic, and several angels from the logistics industry. With the close of the round, Dexory has now raised $120 million over the past three years.
Dexory says its product, DexoryView, provides real-time visibility across warehouses of any size through its autonomous mobile robots and AI. The rolling bots use sensor and image data and continuous data collection to perform rapid warehouse scans and create digital twins of warehouse spaces, allowing for optimized performance and future scenario simulations.
Originally announced in September, the move will allow Deutsche Bahn to “fully focus on restructuring the rail infrastructure in Germany and providing climate-friendly passenger and freight transport operations in Germany and Europe,” Werner Gatzer, Chairman of the DB Supervisory Board, said in a release.
For its purchase price, DSV gains an organization with around 72,700 employees at over 1,850 locations. The new owner says it plans to investment around one billion euros in coming years to promote additional growth in German operations. Together, DSV and Schenker will have a combined workforce of approximately 147,000 employees in more than 90 countries, earning pro forma revenue of approximately $43.3 billion (based on 2023 numbers), DSV said.
After removing that unit, Deutsche Bahn retains its core business called the “Systemverbund Bahn,” which includes passenger transport activities in Germany, rail freight activities, operational service units, and railroad infrastructure companies. The DB Group, headquartered in Berlin, employs around 340,000 people.
“We have set clear goals to structurally modernize Deutsche Bahn in the areas of infrastructure, operations and profitability and focus on the core business. The proceeds from the sale will significantly reduce DB’s debt and thus make an important contribution to the financial stability of the DB Group. At the same time, DB Schenker will gain a strong strategic owner in DSV,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said in a release.
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
Serious inland flooding and widespread power outages are likely to sweep across Florida and other Southeast states in coming days with the arrival of Hurricane Helene, which is now predicted to make landfall Thursday evening along Florida’s northwest coast as a major hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the most catastrophic landfall impact is expected in the sparsely-population Big Bend area of Florida, it’s not only sea-front cities that are at risk. Since Helene is an “unusually large storm,” its flooding, rainfall, and high winds won’t be limited only to the Gulf Coast, but are expected to travel hundreds of miles inland, the weather service said. Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in the region even before the storm comes ashore, and the wet conditions will continue to move northward into the southern Appalachians region through Friday, dumping storm total rainfall amounts of up to 18 inches. Specifically, the major flood risk includes the urban areas around Tallahassee, metro Atlanta, and western North Carolina.
In addition to its human toll, the storm could exert serious business impacts, according to the supply chain mapping and monitoring firm Resilinc. Those will be largely triggered by significant flooding, which could halt oil operations, force mandatory evacuations, restrict ports, and disrupt air traffic.
While the storm’s track is currently forecast to miss the critical ports of Miami and New Orleans, it could still hurt operations throughout the Southeast agricultural belt, which produces products like soybeans, cotton, peanuts, corn, and tobacco, according to Everstream Analytics.
That widespread footprint could also hinder supply chain and logistics flows along stretches of interstate highways I-10 and I-75 and on regional rail lines operated by Norfolk Southern and CSX. And Hurricane Helene could also likely impact business operations by unleashing power outages, deep flooding, and wind damage in northern Florida portions of Georgia, Everstream Analytics said.
Before the storm had even touched Florida soil, recovery efforts were already being launched by humanitarian aid group the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it is urging residents in the storm's path across the Southeast to heed evacuation notices and safety advisories, and reminding members of the logistics community that their post-storm help could be needed soon. The group will continue to update its Disaster Micro-Site with Hurricane Helene resources and with requests for donated logistics assistance, most of which will start arriving within 24 to 72 hours after the storm’s initial landfall, ALAN said.