Pictured above: ArcBest’s Vaux Freight Movement System and Vaux Smart Autonomy represent two giant steps forward in the evolution of materials movement. (Photos provided)
It is another busy day at the warehouse, semi after semi pulling up to the docks and multiple forklifts scuttling to and fro down long aisles across the yawning space. The process of loading and unloading the trailers has not changed that much to the naked eye, save for one thing: There is not a human in sight steering forklifts, lifting loads or depositing pallets.
Welcome to ArcBest’s warehouse of the future, one made possible by two revolutionary products created by the Fort Smith-based freight and logistics solutions provider. The products — 2023’s Vaux Freight Movement System and Vaux Smart Autonomy, released this spring — represent two giant steps forward in the evolution of materials movement.
“We’ve been in logistics for a hundred years, and logistics is typically concerned with the movement of goods from point A to point B,” said Michael Newcity, ArcBest chief innovation officer and president of ArcBest Technologies. “When you start talking about the bigger supply chain, you really start introducing what’s happening inside the warehouse, what’s happening inside the dock. The term there is intralogistics.
Michael Newcity
“We’re very focused on our customers and helping them solve these complex problems. We felt like we could help them with this by introducing technology inside the warehouse that touches this cross-dock load/unload process.”
Ever since COVID-19 kinked the supply chain such as to strangle the flow of goods, logistics has elevated to the public consciousness like never before. Consumers saw firsthand how fragile the systems for getting goods from manufacturers to store shelves actually were, and transportation companies have been searching ever since for ways to shore up and reimagine distribution and freight-handling processes once widely taken for granted.
Much of that effort has fallen on the backs of trucking companies, and for good reason. Intermodal options such as rail, air and sea all pull a share of the movement of things, especially in bulk, but when it comes moving freight to within reach of most consumers, trucking stands head and shoulders above these other modes of traffic. According to the American Trucking Associations, more than 72 percent of U.S. freight is hauled at some point by truck, and that includes to the distribution centers that make online commerce fulfillment possible.
The profit matrix for freight companies is built on several factors, not the least of which is efficient use of time and manpower, which includes more efficient loading and unloading of semis. This has brought warehouse operations under more and more scrutiny and led management to seek better solutions to keep freight flowing, boost safety and minimize damaged goods.
According to data from the 2024 Outlook Survey by Peerless Research Group, released by Logistics Management, an average of 30 percent of those queried between 2022 and 2024 were planning to invest in materials-handling equipment and other technologies, although it is notable 2024 is the lowest of the three due to ongoing inflation and other economic factors.
Despite that, an overwhelming 90 percent of respondents said they expected their spending to be the same or higher this year compared to last year, and a like percentage expect to spend as much or more over the next two to three years as in 2024. Respondents also showed an appetite for new thinking; about half of the companies making investments this year are doing so in first-time, disruptive applications, a jump of almost 10 percent over each of the past two years.
The ArcBest innovations are nothing if not disruptive. Last year’s Vaux Freight product, which earned a spot on Time magazine’s most innovative inventions list, reduces trailer loading and unloading time from hours to a matter of minutes. The system employs a racking system to fit inside a semitrailer that can be loaded and unloaded in its entirety, rather than by individual pallets. The system can be configured in a multitude of ways to match the products being hauled and is loaded or unloaded from both sides by multiple forklifts prior to being maneuvered into a trailer.
“The system’s software that optimizes the labor around that uses AI to calculate a next best move, if you will, for loading and unloading,” Newcity said. “Think of the positions on that mobile platform as airline seats, and the software is assigning the seats in terms of where to place the freight and optimize it. What that’s done is it’s taken a process that’s normally two to four hours of loading or unloading a truck down to mere minutes.
“When you think about the capital that’s involved in having a truck pull up with a tractor and a driver, and they’re sitting for two to four hours, that’s a lot of capital that’s tied up in that process.”
If Vaux Freight is stunning in its simplicity, Vaux Smart Autonomy is a full-on futuristic assault on the senses. The new system takes the freight the next step by deploying up to 40 autonomous forklifts to handle not only loading and unloading trailers via Vaux Freight, but manage individual pallet placement and retrieval throughout the warehouse.
“What you have is what we call a robot fleet manager, an RFM. It’s like the operating system for the forklift fleet, and it’s taking the assignments,” Newcity said. “In the warehouse, they may have what they call a warehouse management system, a WMS, which is taking all the pick orders. It’s telling what has to move to the staging area or what has to move to this truck or that truck. It sends orders to the RFM software, and what’s unique about our software is it takes that pass, and it breaks it down.
“This task, let’s say, is five parts; four of those parts are going to be autonomous, one of those parts is going to be teleoperated, and then it sends out the task in the appropriate sequence to the operator. It’s doing that across all of our autonomous forklifts in the fleet. We’re first in the industry in this.”
The forklifts, which come in three models, can shelve loads as high as 40 feet, reach speeds in excess of 7 miles per hour and operate in put-away spaces as tight as 9.5 feet. Employing onboard sensors, each machine scans bar codes to identify freight and deliver to the right storage aisle and space and can even drive evasively to avoid something in its path.
“These forklifts are almost independent robots,” Newcity said. “They navigate the environment independently. They have built-in safety mechanisms. That’s why they’re easy to introduce into the environment. The robot fleet manager software has a map of the warehouse, so it understands things like pathing and different lanes these forklifts can operate in. The customer can modify those lanes.
“Safety is always a priority, and so what they do when they encounter each other or they encounter a person, they have all the smarts to navigate that environment or to stop altogether. They do get smarter as they’re on the floor, and that’s a huge AI component to this. Every time it makes a run in the environment, it’s learning from that.”
With the ArcBest system, operators gain the ability to control machines and the flow of materials remotely.
Aside from those benefits, the system also addresses one of the thorniest issues facing the industry right now: a lack of labor. According to Logistics Management’s “2023 Study of Logistics and Transportation Trends,” labor-related issues, including costs, talent shortage and availability, ranked with inflation as the top four industry challenges for 2024. With the ArcBest system, operators gain the ability to control machines and the flow of materials remotely, stretching available personnel.
“The teleoperator could be an employee of the company sitting there in the warehouse, or he could be one of our teleoperators sitting in Fort Smith, or she could be in Mexico or in Europe,” Newcity said. “We’ve got some customers that have said, ‘We’ve been needing this to start a third shift, but we can’t get the labor in our market to do it.’ This enables them to start that third shift. It also potentially enables us to get to different labor pools. Maybe it’s the aging workforce for whom driving a forklift can be taxing, or it might be a disabled veteran that operated heavy equipment in the military.”
The fact that a heritage trucking company is producing such technology as a business unit speaks to the changing face of the industry, at least at its highest levels. Newcity rides herd over a team of 600 in the tech division, which begs the question of whether ArcBest was today a transportation company heavy into technology or a technology company that happened to deal in transportation. It is a paradigm that gives Newcity pause.
“Will customers tell us to get back in our lane? We haven’t had a single customer say, ‘Why are you doing this?’” he said. “What they say instead is, ‘This makes sense for you to do because you’ve been in the freight-handling business for a hundred years versus some startup.’
“I see us as a company that is solving logistics problems for our customers. We’re doing that through a great culture, we’re doing that through relationships, and it’s undergirded by technology and innovation. It’s all there.”
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