Digital Transformation:
Easily Keeping Pace

In line with the corporate identity, FORTNA, based in Hamburg, Germany, sees its role as a partner and consultant to the world’s leading brands to transform omnichannel and parcel distribution operations. We spoke to the newly appointed President, FORTNA International, Thomas van Workum, about the company’s services and goals in the German-speaking DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

Mr. van Workum, FORTNA deals with the planning of intralogistics and distribution processes. The latter play a major role in extralogistics. So is your company a “one-stop store”?

FORTNA leverages automation, software and robotics to enable companies to outpace the demands of tomorrow. We are an end-to-end design-build firm, designing and delivering data-driven warehouse and distribution solutions powered by automation, software and robotics. The term one-stop store applies to us insofar as we cover all areas of distribution logistics that take place within the warehouse or distribution centre in relation to the upstream aspects of the supply chain. Downstream, on the other hand, all subsequent processes, from scheduling through loading and transportation up to delivery, we do not include.

As we all know, planning is half the battle. Mr. van Workum, after two and a half years in the USA, you have decided to return to Europe in your personal life planning, despite the current industrial renaissance in the States … It seems that FORTNA has big plans on the “old continent”?

From the very beginning, I was determined to return to Europe in the long term—both professionally and privately. I’m excited to play a major role in the FORTNA aggressive go-to- market growth plan, expanding our business in the fields of consulting, systems integration and lifecycle performance services and focusing efforts in Europe, taking into account the specific local characteristics. The newly created position of President International will manage this strategy, creating a win-win situation.

Restructuring in Europe: FORTNA presented its strategy for the first time at LogiMAT 2024

Your new job as President, FORTNA International, which you have been holding for almost six months now, is what exactly? Team leader, team player, enabler for top performance? Or, in the spirit of “train the trainer”, can we speak of “advise the consultants”?

Team leader, team player, enabler for top performance—a combination of everything. I am very happy and grateful to be able to lead a team that combines so much expertise, professionalism and specialist knowledge, spurs each other on to top performance, and has the motivation and will to develop and implement solutions that make our customers fit for the future and achieve decisive competitive advantages.

By the end of 2023, FORTNA announced its collaboration with the Chinese AMR provider Geekplus. How does a goods-to-person picking solution go together with the mobile sorting systems of your new partner? What did you expect from this cooperation and where are you now after about six months?

By working with strategic partners, we are able to expand existing technologies on the market with our own expertise and realise additional performance for special applications. This enables us to offer our customers tailor-made solutions with added value. Our collaboration with Geekplus is a great example of this. Geekplus’ robotics solutions are directly integrated into FORTNA WES™ and benefit from our software’s ability to prioritise jobs in real time. When used on site, this means that our customers can adapt much more dynamically to changing fulfillment requirements. By fine-tuning the load and taking into account the Geekplus performance values, FORTNA WES™ is able to allocate orders to the system at the optimal time, maximising throughput. We are continuously developing our existing technology partnerships. The milestone so far—and I am anticipating your next question—is the recognition of our FORTNA OptiSweep solution as “Automated Sortation System of the Year” in the annual SupplyTech Breakthrough Awards in the USA. We leverage FORTNA WCS™ software, proprietary hardware, and autonomous Geekplus robots to automate a normally labour-intensive process in high-volume e-Commerce and parcel distribution centres.

Your FORTNA “OptiSweep” robotic solution – is this the first result of your cooperation with Geekplus? To what extent does this new development, which follows on directly the classic sorting process, make your customers less dependent on labour shortages?

To the first question, quite clearly yes. Automation solutions such as FORTNA OptiSweep™ develop their greatest potential by taking over simple, repetitive tasks, thus relieving the burden on the employees. In this respect, OptiSweep not only helps to take the pressure off our customers in times of labour challenges, but also enables optimised personnel deployment that is more appealing to employees.

With your slotting software, FORTNA OptiSlot, you want to promote digital transformation for your customers by using algorithms to optimise storage locations and picking paths. Has the upgrade of your OptiSlot software to Spanish and to German had a noticeable impact on your revenue in the German-speaking countries?

Our OptiSlot™ software has been implemented very successfully around the world. In Europe, we already have a customer base with some large installations. One example of driving growth for our OptiSlot software was to offer a German-language version—software that is an integral part of our global customers’ day-to-day business in warehousing and logistics as an optimisation and control tool.

The Fortna Distribution Optimisation Framework – what exactly is it? And what exactly is Optimisation Science, on which this framework is based?

As a globally active company, we have developed fulfillment and distribution solutions for a wide range of products, sales channels and regions over many decades. We have combined the knowledge and expertise gained from this into an approach that is our method, our way: The FORTNA Distribution Optimisation Framework™ with its proprietary processes, tools and algorithms. Our goal is to provide a roadmap from the initial supply chain strategy to runtime support for warehousing and logistics to the future-proof and successful positioning of our customers in clearly defined steps.

How close is the cooperation with other intralogistics experts? I’m thinking of the Intersport project in Heilbronn, for example, in which Körber was also involved as a system integrator and Gebhardt as a conveyor technology supplier.

I have to go into a little detail here, because we differ from other integrators in our approach. The starting point for our work is always our customers’ data, their requirements and their goals. And from this, we develop the optimum material flow design that reflects the performance requirements. If a supplier’s technology is the optimal solution within this design, we will use it wherever possible—always in the interests of our customers. Intersport is a customer with whom we have been working successfully for over 20 years—just like the project partners you mentioned. The added value that we offer our customers as solution-independent consultants and implementers is our neutrality, our “customer first” approach. And it is precisely this approach that has formed the basis of our customer relationships over many decades.