Merits

• Jakob Hatteland built up the electronics parts wholesaler Jakob Hatteland Electronics AS, named after him, into the most important player in Norway in the 1980s. In the 1990s, his technical director Ingvar Hognaland came up with the idea for space-saving Cube Storage Automation, an automated storage system based on the cube principle, which later became famous under the product name AutoStore. In 1996, Hatteland and Hognaland founded AutoStore as a technology company in Nedre Vats. Hognaland's idea of using all the available space in a warehouse led to AutoStore's central design element: the grid. The overall system consists of an aluminum grid, robots, bins, workstations and a controller. The robots go along the top of the grid on rails and remove bins from the bays as needed.
• After introducing the first AutoStore for internal use in 2002, Hatteland recognized the global potential of the system and decided to commercialize AutoStore starting in 2004. The AutoStore principle enabled unprecedented efficiency in warehouse logistics: it is scalable, space-saving and energy-efficient, providing high throughput rates as well as very good uptime. The modular design can be integrated into any infrastructure, and 75 percent of the volume can be saved compared to conventional systems. In 2023, more than 1,250 AutoStore systems are in use in 50 countries in around 900 companies worldwide. After Hatteland and Hognaland successfully sold AutoStore to an investor, it was valued at more than €1.5 billion - before being sold to a second investor in 2019. It was Norway's first unicorn. 
• The two Norwegians are overdue for induction into the Logistics Hall of Fame, according to the jury. Hognaland invented the cube storage automation and developed it into a perfect system that today has more than 1,600 patents. Hatteland goes down in logistics history for one thing, courageously believing in the success of the system for years and building a network of select international distributors that made AutoStore a worldwide best-seller.