Roundup: Award Winning Specialty Pallet At PACK EXPO, Emerging Automation Trends

Moving Heavy, Awkward or Delicate Loads:

Product of the Year Onsite at PharmaExpo 2016 Booth W-417

The AeroGo Stainless Steel Air-Powered Pallet, silver medal recipient of the Plant Engineering “Product of the Year,” will be on site and operational at PharmaExpo booth W-417 at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center. The stainless steel pallet, which is capable of lifting and moving up to 31,000 lbs., received the second highest number of votes from the readers of Plant Engineering magazine to attain the Silver Medal in the Material Handling Systems category for the 2015 Product of the Year Awards. Products are nominated based on “Plant Engineering’s reader’s selection of outstanding new products that help them do their jobs smarter, safer, more efficiently and more productively.”

For more information, visit AeroGo at http://www.aerogo.com/applications/pharmaceutical-biotech/.

Founded in 1967, AeroGo provides industrial hovercraft and customized load moving solutions for heavy, awkward, or delicate loads

Warehouse automation: five emerging trends

Ergonomics, new tote configurations deliver efficiency, sustainability

Greg Alesci of ORBIS Corporation, and Tom Pollard, P.Eng., of Cimcorp, a leading warehouse automation provider, collaborate in this piece to offer a concise, reusable container-centric viewpoint of automation trends. One point of note has to do with ergonomics. Ergonomically friendly design, including such features as hand holds and restricted load capacity to provide safe handling, has been one of the major attractions of reusable packaging. With automation and the elimination of human handling, however, totes can hold more product and be stacked higher than would be safely possible by humans. Other bullet points include New Tote Configurations, Standardized Totes, Reduction in Racking and More Traceability. The article appears in Plant Engineering.

Shippers Treat Bikes Better if They Think They’re TVs!

Occasionally we like to feature a story which may not be strictly A&IP, but is certainly smart! Because Dutch bike company VanMoof makes a lot of its sales online, it relies on shipping firms to deliver its highly prized two-wheelers. But the problem is a lot of the bikes were getting damaged en route to the customer … until an employee came up with a brainwave.

The company was finding that too many of its bicycles were arriving at customers’ doors “looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester.” So it wondered what on earth it could do to get shippers to be a little more careful with its stylish velocipedes. Read more at AIPA.