HOJ Innovations history dates back over 60 years. The Utah-based warehouse inventory management has over six decades of experience in optimizing materials handling and fulfillment processes.

WarehouseOS (WOS), the company’s inventory management software, optimizes inventory control across various warehouse operations and a multitude of industries.

With the software side of the operation handled, what about the hardware?

HOJ launches an AMR division

In late October 2025, HOJ Innovations announced its plan to launch an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) division in its Salt Lake City HQ.

“I’d say five years ago we started saying, how can AMRs be helpful in our WarehouseOS environment,” said Tim Hoj, CEO of HOJ Innovations. “That’s really been a stage where we help clients to really produce productive results and get higher efficiencies out of operations... I think it was really this calculated next step thus for WarehouseOS to have automation interface capabilities.”

When HOJ announced the news, the company made the conscious decision not to reinvent the proverbial AMR wheel.

“We feel like our strongest role really is a system integrator,” said Stan Witt, director of engineering at HOJ Innovations. “We didn’t want to go out and build AMRs from scratch. We wanted to focus on the application for the customer and the functionality of the robot.”

In conjunction with the AMR division launch, HOJ also announced a major expansion to its SLC HQ, creating a space for the team to align its long-standing software platform with the newly-minted hardware division.

“We recently did an expansion in our building for the technology group, where we added on about 5,000 square feet of our second level to create more office space for the software team and the automation team,” Hoj added. “We created this R&D area of the building that was not planned for any expansion. It’s just like this playground to kind of push some boundaries around what WarehouseOS and AMRs could do together.”

Software creates synergy between human and robots

“The relationship between human, hardware and software is a technical dance, and one that requires high levels of orchestration. Integrating autonomous robots and humans that result in significant productivity gains requires careful planning and forethought.

“We’ve noticed in some of the applications where we have WOS, you can have a lot of pickers out there, and they create this quantity of carts that have been picked that are now waiting to be packed,” Witt said. “Say that there are 20 or 30 of those. How are those managed? Where are they parked? We’ll see packers might go over and touch those carts several times to rearrange them and bring them closer to the pack stations and bring them closer to the pack stations. All of that is lost production.”

The HOJ team said that their years of experience in combining automation and human processes uniquely position them to design operations that achieve the optimization that customers look for when implementing AMR systems.

“An AMR integrated into a system can take fully picked carts from the picking area and park them by the pack stations,” Witt added. “As one cart is fully packed out, an AMR can deliver a pack station to them so the packers aren’t going over and managing all these carts manually. We can recover all that walking time that an operator is just walking to a cart. These are the types of things we’re thinking might be the biggest bang for the buck for the application.”

HOJ’s AMR portfolio grows in size and shape

The HOJ AMR lineup features several offerings, ranging from smaller, lifting robots and conveyor top robots for handling totes and packages, to larger fork trucks, lifting and rotating top robots to handle pallet loads up to 6,600 lbs. The goal, according to the HOJ team, is to provide a series of robots capable of handling a myriad of tasks.

“The idea is to automate the manufacturing process with robots,” Hoj said. “AMRs that can pick up underneath heavy loads, drive them into position, whether it’s a manufacturing process, a curing, or a staging. All of a sudden, this space becomes much more affordable, much more manageable, and flows better. Sometimes it’s automating something very small, like a tote. That’s probably the most common in fulfillment. But the benefits to heavy manufacturing are that these machines are much smaller than the traditional forklift and can do it in much better aisles and better plant layouts.”

HOJ Innovations’ first AMR application was installed in Q2 of 2025. Since then, HOJ said that it has received multiple contracts for AMR systems and is currently in different stages of implementation.

SEER partnership focuses on innovation, adaptability and safety

HOJ Innovations has been working closely with SEER Robotics. HOJ said that SEER’s impressive lineup of AMRs, advanced controls and navigation capabilities were key factors in its decision to partner with them after carefully evaluating several leading AMR suppliers.

“We hired a director of automation, Mahli Guerrero, who did the research and kind of the discovery of what AMRs were out there,” Hoj said. “Mahli identified who we’d like to talk with, started to form some evaluations, and then started doing control panel engineering. Mahli, in seeing the control capability with SEER, said they were really kind of a standout in her analysis.”

In addition to the control, the de facto brains of the robot, HOJ also make a concerted effort to focus on safety.

“What we’re finding out, particularly in the manufacturing world, is the importance of having AMRs that are UL compliant or CE compliant,” Witt said. “Not just from an electrical standpoint, but both UL and CE have safety standards now for autonomous robots... SEER has a good lineup of AMRs that have UL or CE certifications. Those are the ones that we’re really focusing on, because particularly in a manufacturing environment, our customers want to see those certifications on the robots.”