Toyota Material Handling and BlooLoc join forces on first ever pilot project

Log!Ville also aims to become a home for co-creation, a place where companies use cross-pollination to create new and innovative solutions. And within barely a month of our launch the first partnership between a Foundation Partner and a Start2Scale-Up Partner was already up and running. Peter Van Cauwenbergh, Commercial Director of Toyota Material Handling Belgium, and BlooLoc head of Sales Marketing, Stijn Vantilt, tell us more about their venture.

'BlooLoc is an indoor localisation specialist,' says Stijn Vantilt. 'Its DNA is in localisation solutions for healthcare facilities and major public buildings, such as airports and convention centres. Thanks to yooBeeEYE, the logistics industry is now also in our sights.'

'We offer a platform of three combinable solutions, all based on vision technology: yooBeeEYE SAFE monitors the exact real-time location of every forklift and enables all devices to communicate with each other in real time. That prevents collisions involving people, racks and vehicles, while vehicle speeds can be adjusted in real time according to the location and the situation. Meanwhile, yooBeeEYE TRACK oversees stock management without further scanning being required. The system tracks the movements of individual pallets in the warehouse using a digital twin with x, y and z coordinates. Then there is yooBeeEYE Insights, a dashboard featuring current and smart figures with the focus on devising new optimisation plans.

'What is unique about BlooLoc's solution is the 3D localisation based on vision technology, with no hardware or GPS or other messaging required," Stijn continues. 'We create a 3D model of the building in which the vehicles and goods move around. That model allows the WMS to pinpoint exactly where every pallet is located without the need to scan barcodes.'

Toyota Material Handling

'Toyota Material Handling provides internal transport solutions, ranging from simple pallet trucks through to fully automated storage systems with warehousing vehicles, forklifts, and so on,' Peter Van Cauwenbergh takes up the story. 'Over 95 percent of our vehicles are manufactured in our European factories in Mjölby, Sweden, Ancenis, France, and Bologna, Italy.'

'Our Strategic Innovation department, which is based in Sweden, focuses on sustainability, connectivity and automation. That means there is an increasing need to work with universities and knowledge institutes, and the fact that we were a Foundation Partner of Log!Ville is a part of that aspect – many solutions and a great deal of intelligence in a single location is not just a catalyser for innovation, but also for co-creation,' the Commercial Director tells us.

First pilot project

The very first example of this is the partnership between TMHBE and BlooLoc. 'The partnership simply happened, rather than being planned,' according to Peter. 'We delivered a forklift to Log!Ville and BlooLoc also needed one to demonstrate its system. Strategic Innovation in Sweden got to hear about it, and we have now embarked on exploratory talks with the company.'

'The great advantage of yooBeeEYE is that we can make our forklift trucks safer and more productive in a simple manner. And that is all the more true for the manually-operated trucks in our range, which is still the biggest share of the market in terms of volume,' he adds.

'As a scaleup we have struggled to quickly launch our solution on the market, because pilot projects are an essential component,' Stijn relates. 'That has proved to be a major hurdle for us because logistics companies can be hard to access, and so we were delighted that through Log!Ville we met an established player that has that access. Our next step is to launch a pilot project together that will see us scaling up the solution we are presently demonstrating at Log!Ville.'

'The project will shortly be rolled out at a soon-to-be-named logistics company, giving us access to data derived from a real-life work environment that we can use to better substantiate the returns on investment (ROI),' Stijn concludes.