Industrial Equipment Maker/Software System Supplier
Here’s why being a first-class developer of equipment may not be enough to keep customers satisfied.
Although Raymond Corp. (www.raymondcorp.com) is primarily a manufacturer of industrial equipment such as lift trucks, pallet jacks, and other warehousing equipment, a recent product development challenge wasn’t about the machinery per se. Rather, when a major hardware retailer came to Raymond, it was looking for a way to reduce the maintenance costs for its lift truck fleet by 10% per year for three years. So it wasn’t a matter of developing a better lift truck. It was about developing what has become known as the iWarehouse system, which compiles data on fleet maintenance, operator OSHA compliance, operational optimization, and more. iWarehouse is a plug-and-play set of modules that leverages the equipment on the floor.
Given that a lift truck costs on the order of $35,000 and a pallet jack $15,000, and given that warehouse managers are under increasing pressure to assure that their fleets are being utilized to their maximum efficiency, Raymond has learned that it isn’t simply in the business of building better equipment but that it also has to make the warehouse managers’ jobs simpler.
An example is the iMetric module. It monitors fleet usage throughout the day, then analyzes equipment operating patterns and makes recommendations on better equipment utilization. According to Joe LaFergola, manager of business and information solutions at Raymond, “We have a customer who operates as a subcontractor to his parent company and each month he has to turn in a report on how many hours he used each truck. Each month he has to take a list of the trucks, look at each individual hour meter, and then put that data in by hand. Using iMetric he gets that data automatically, saving as much as $4,800 per year on that one report alone.”
Another aspect to industrial equipment use that has always been important, but is becoming more so given limited capital budgets, is repair and maintenance. So Raymond developed modules to deal with these, as well. There is iTrack, which monitors the maintenance schedule for each truck and provides alerts when a truck is due in for a checkup. And there is iAlert: “With iAlert,” LaFergola says, “the truck phones home for help. It tells the maintenance staff the exact code, date and time of the problem, along with the make, model and serial number of the truck involved.” This has helped minimize the overall time to repair a vehicle thanks to the speed of providing the necessary information.
Then there is the “pencil whipping” that’s common to warehouse operations. No, this has nothing to do with beating writing instruments, but it refers to what happens when equipment operators have to fill out endless forms. Pencil whipping is just checking off the boxes without actually checking the condition of the machine ostensibly being assessed. The checklists then go to someone else for entry into a compliance reporting system. For this, the iVerify module was developed. It completes the pre-operation OSHA checklist and transmits the data directly to the company’s database. LaFergola estimates this saves about two minutes per vehicle and up to 40 hours per year.
Next up: developing a module that will improve battery monitoring accuracy to assure trucks aren’t operated beyond their power limitations.
