HOJ Innovations provides hardware and software to integrate warehouse inventory management processes. The Salt Lake City-based company last month completed an expansion of its facilities to support growth across areas including its autonomous mobile robot, or AMR, division.
“At HOJ, we believe that great workspaces fuel innovation and collaboration, which ultimately leads to better results and solutions for our customers,” said Tim Hoj, CEO of HOJ Innovations. “The upgrades to our office will strengthen the communication between teams, provide a modernized workplace for employees, and offer our team an environment to foster innovative solutions delivered to the warehousing industry.”
Henning Hoj founded the company as HOJ Engineering and Sales in 1964, and his sons Peter and Tim have continued his legacy. HOJ Innovations said it has sold, installed, and serviced more than 100,000 fulfillment projects worldwide.
“My father was a immigrant from Denmark, and my mother wanted to see the world,” said Tim Hoj. “They worked in the U.S. and Canada for a little while, but when they went back to Denmark, they really missed working in the States. He started the business as an overhead crane company but soon branched from design and supply for heavy industry to general material handling.”
“As soon as they needed products from other areas of the building, they needed fork trucks and to store those products,” he told Automated Warehouse. “We got into racking pretty early on in the business, which became full-service material handling.”
HOJ expands to enable collaboration
HOJ Innovations has expanded its campus by 4,400 sq. ft. (408.7 sq. m) brining the total size to more than 58,000 sq. ft. (5,388.3 sq. m). The facility now includes a dedicated research and development modeling space, with designated areas for HOJ’s Automated Mobile Robots, WarehouseOS Software, and Automated Controls teams.
“The consulting side of our business is probably 15 to 17 years old, and the software side is about 10,” said Hoj. “The consulting division was helping to write functional specs for warehousing, storage, management, and inventory control, and we saw this need for a WMS product that was much more affordable to industry.”
“We built a WMS with a couple of U.S. patents that were centered around deploying it on an iPad,” he recalled. “Instead of using the traditional RF gun, we use a highly visible interactive display, and the users could have Bluetooth-tethered scanners on their fingers or wrists.”
As robotics advanced in the past decade, HOJ’s controls and automation groups needed to work on AMRs, robot arms, and applications such as palletizing, said Hoj. After people returned to offices after the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided to create space for collaboration. The expansion took place over the past eight months.
“We wanted the automation, controls, and software to work together in a space where they can test out where robotics is going to be helpful and where it can and really be a contributor.” Hoj explained. “We’re not looking to push it into every corner, but we’re looking to find where processes can be enhanced and and save time.”
Robots can transform the warehouse floor
“Right now, the teams are finding ways to call for robots, and they’re and they’re using interfaces in the WMS to potentially look at how interleaving automation and AMRs in that process would be beneficial,” said Hoj. “That’s the kind of the discovery that’s going on, and it’s very exciting.”
HOJ is working with Geekplus Technology Co. on goods-to-person (G2P) fulfillment and SEER Robotics for AMR hardware and fleet management software.
“We recently had a an industrial site that had a traditional overhead rail conveyor that received materials and distributed them to assembly stations,” Hoj said. “It was an old system that needed to be replaced, and five or even three years ago, we would have probably just replaced it.”
“In a recent collaboration with SEER, we realized that carrying product from the warehouse to work in progress and inventory and assembly didn’t have to be done that way anymore,” he added. “We could do it with a cart that is mobilized by an AMR. The whole center area that was a big obstruction between production and warehousing evaporated. That deployment was unbelievably transformative, and we’re looking for the next project like that to assist.”
Integration of AMRs, software helps SMB adoption
HOJ Innovations added that streamlined implementation of its iOS-driven technologies enables customers to efficiently and cost-effectively maximize productivity with inventory management systems. The company has worked to make robots and software become more affordable to deploy, with its pre-engineered offerings opening up possibilities for small and midsize businesses, Hoj said.
“WarehouseOS allows us a disruptive opportunity to provide inventory control and and excellence in fulfillment,” he noted. “It is built for the warehouse worker and provides all the data for upstream ERPs [enterprise resource planning software] and requirements. It is for workflows on the floor. We’re doing that cost effectively on a cloud-deployed basis; that allows us to to integrate very inexpensively.”
“We have a another technology called instalink.io, which is an API [application programming interface] connector,” he added. “When we talk to a new customer, and they have a Shopify site or a channel advisor, we have these API layers that are pre-programmed, tools that are cost-effective to deploy and can be mirrored for the next environment. It allows us to deploy software into other new customers with a low integration cost.”
HOJ builds room for growth
“Utah is a great entrepreneurial environment; there’s a lot of innovative businesses,” said Hoj. “Startups here tend to be more bootstrapped.”
HOJ Innovations said its expanded facility also includes a test warehouse, where customers can see real-world robots firsthand. The company added that it built room for up to 50% headcount growth as the warehouse industry and automation evolve.
“Businesses with the right tools can absolutely compete with any distributor,” Hoj asserted. “The innovation side and the justification side have to work pretty close together to say, ‘Where do we really get the benefit?’ Part of this expansion is to provide technologies that not only help them do things better or faster than before but that also have a positive overall impact on ROI [return on investment] now.”
