Material Handling: The Toyota Way
When you think of customization, forklifts probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. But in the world of material handling, addressing customer needs is paramount, and a forklift design used for one application may not be the right solution for another. Therefore, it’s important for engineers and designers to look at the forklift as a basic platform from which customers can tailor the details to meet their specific needs. This is the philosophy followed by the product development team at Toyota Material Handling U.S.A. (toyotaforklift.com), where upwards of 50% of the forklifts produced feature some customized features tailored specifically to the end-user.
“We are very, very customer-driven. If you don’t have the flexibility to modify an existing part design to the customer’s application, you are going to lose that sale,” says Martin Boyd, national product planning manager at Toyota Material Handling U.S.A. The company has a team of design engineers tasked with modifying existing parts in the company’s database to customer requirements within 90 days, the time its take a forklift to reach the end user from order to shipment. For example, a standard overhead guard might cause a problem for one customer due to space or height limitations, so it will be modified to meet the customer’s requirements from existing CAD data before the forklift leaves the assembly line.
The company typically upgrades an existing forklift design every three to four years, while a completely reengineered forklift debuts on average every eight or nine years. Research on upgrades begins the moment the first model of the new generation is put into use: “Right when a new model launches we start collecting data—we keep very detailed technical reports in case there are issues in the field with a product we launched,” Boyd says. The company has a voice-of-the-customer program that uses survey data to determine what improvements need to be made from a field-user perspective; the top common items identified in the surveys are paramount when it comes to the priorities for the next redesign. Two years before a new product is launched into the market, the chief engineer for Toyota’s material handling group travels from Japan to visit customers and get direct feedback.
Toyota’s engineering and design team utilizes CATIA software from Dassault Systèmes to manage the product development process. The company has drastically reduced the number of physical models it builds to validate components and complete systems, but the need for physical prototypes still exists. “We used to build seven prototypes and review them in various customer applications. Now we’re probably down to three or four,” Boyd says, adding physical prototypes allow engineers and designers to “confirm” what was imagined but, more importantly, they provide a critical role in allowing the team to identify what was missed quickly: “They remain an extremely valuable part of the development process.”
One aspect that will play a vital role in the future of Toyota’s lift truck business is aesthetic design. “Europe has been on the leading edge when it comes to designs that are pleasing to the eye, and that trend has come to the U.S. market. Aesthetic appeal is now discussed in the development process,” Boyd says. It even goes as far as decal placement and color choice. Industrial designers are looking at new shapes for rear counterweights, which have historically been little more than an afterthought.
Toyota’s near-term innovation in the lift truck business is likely to focus on powertrain. The company has an internal goal of improving the fuel efficiency and reducing emissions output of its lift trucks by 50%, and to fulfill that endeavor has introduced a diesel-hybrid lift truck into the Japanese market, with plans to expand its availability into the U.S. A hydrogen fuel-cell-powered prototype has also been developed. “We went through a period in the last 15 years where you didn’t see much innovation on the forklift side of the business but that’s changing rapidly,” Boyd says.
