FORT WORTH, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 9, 2026--
Advanced Intralogistics, a performance-focused warehouse automation integrator, today announced a strategic partnership and mutual reseller agreement with Top Hat Engineering™, a controls and software engineering firm specializing in warehouse optimization.
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Through this partnership, Advanced Intralogistics will serve as a verified reseller of Top Hat’s solutions, and customers will benefit from a more connected, scalable, and intelligent approach to automation.
"This collaboration solidifies a shared commitment to delivering turnkey automation solutions that work in the real world,” notes Anthony Pishotti, President of Advanced Intralogistics. "By combining Top Hat’s AI-driven systems with our automation solutions, we are giving our customers the tools they need to evolve their operations into truly intelligent warehouses."
Customers of both companies now have access to an expanded portfolio of automation solutions, including ClarityWOS™ from Top Hat Engineering. This newly launched Warehouse Optimization System™ (WOS) uses proprietary machine learning to optimize workflow across the facility and integrates with the automation solutions designed and implemented by the Advanced Intralogistics team. ClarityWOS is a true SaaS/PaaS offering that requires no changes to existing master data or hardware.
"This milestone represents far more than a signed agreement,” says Calem Harris, Top Hat Engineering Founder and CEO. “Together, we are uniquely positioned to directly address our customers’ most critical challenges. By combining our strengths, we’re raising the bar for what our customers can expect.”
Attendees at MODEX 2026 will have the opportunity to experience what the two companies offer together firsthand. Top Hat Engineering will join the Advanced Intralogistics team in Booth A4514 to discuss capabilities, project needs, and how their combined offering can be applied across distribution centers, 3PLs, and manufacturing environments.
About Advanced Intralogistics
Advanced Intralogistics is the performance-focused warehouse automation integrator providing end-to-end material handling solutions for the modern supply chain. Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, the company specializes in the design, engineering, and implementation of automation where it makes sense and delivers real results. Learn more at www.advancedintralogistics.com.
About Top Hat Engineering™
Top Hat Engineering is a premier warehouse software and systems engineering firm dedicated to optimizing complex material handling environments. Founded in 2023 by industry veterans who previously led operations and automation for global retail giants, Top Hat Engineering designs solutions from the operator’s perspective. By monitoring real-time data flow and learning from production patterns, Top Hat Engineering provides customers with the intelligence needed to maximize throughput, reduce bottlenecks, and achieve peak operational performance. Learn more at www.tophatengineering.com.
Executives and warehouse operations managers review real-time facility performance using ClarityWOS™ (Warehouse Operating System). The platform provides crucial, moment-by-moment visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling data-driven decision-making for inventory management, labor allocation, and overall operational efficiency.
LONDON (AP) — A 300-million-year-old tentacled sea creature has lost its crown as the world’s oldest octopus, after scientists found evidence that it’s not an octopus at all.
Newly published research concludes that fossilized remains listed by Guinness World Records as the earliest known octopus belong instead to a relative of a nautilus, a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.
University of Reading zoologist Thomas Clements, the lead researcher behind the new findings, said the fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, has long been the subject of scientific debate.
“It’s a very difficult fossil to interpret,” he said. “To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush.
“If you look at it and you are a cephalopod researcher and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus.”
The creature, a blob about the size of a human hand, was found in the Mazon Creek area of Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, that is rich in fossils from a period before dinosaurs walked the Earth.
Its identification by paleontologists as an octopus in 2000 upended ideas about the evolution of the eight-tentacled cephalopods, suggesting they emerged much earlier than previously thought. The next oldest-known octopus fossil is only about 90 million years old.
“It’s a huge gap,” Clements said. “And so that big gap got researchers sort of questioning, ‘Is this thing actually an octopus?”
To solve the mystery of the “weird blob,” Clements and his team used a synchrotron — which uses fast-moving electrons to create beams of light brighter than the sun — to look inside the fossil rock. They found a ribbon of teeth known as a radula that is common to all mollusks, including nautiluses and octopuses. Each row had 11 teeth. Octopuses have either seven or nine.
“This has too many teeth, so it can’t be an octopus,” Clements said. “And that’s how we realize that the world’s oldest octopus is actually a fossil nautilus, not an octopus.”
The teeth matched those of a fossil nautiloid called Paleocadmus pohli that had been found in the same area. Clements said the mistaken identification may have happened because the creature decomposed and lost its telltale shell before it was fossilized, complicating identification.
As a result of the findings published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Guinness World Records said it will no longer list Pohlsepia mazonensis as the earliest known octopus.
Managing Editor Adam Millward said the scientists had made “a fascinating discovery.”
“We will be resting the original ‘oldest octopus fossil’ title and look forward to reviewing this new evidence,” he said.
Pohlsepia mazonensis is named for its discoverer James Pohl, and is in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago.
Paul Mayer, manager of the museum's collection of fossil invertebrates, said he was “a little surprised” by its new classification as a nautiloid, but noted that "people have been questioning whether it was an octopus ever since the original paper was first published in 2000.”
He said new technologies for scientific investigation had brought renewed interest in the Mazon Creek fossils.
“(That) is great for our collections and hopefully new discoveries will be made and new stories will be revealed,” Mayer said.
Clements said the museum should not be disappointed by the new evidence, which means it now has “the oldest soft tissue nautilus in the world.
“The Field Museum have a small collection of these ancient nautiluses, which I think as a cephalopod worker is probably the best thing ever,” he said.
FILE -Field Museum and Chicago's skyline is seen from Soldier Field prior to an NFL preseason football game between the Chicago Bears and the Tennessee Titans, Aug. 12, 2023, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski, File)
