Lift Trucks—For Real

The biggest things happening in the lift truck world these days are happening on the customer side, not at the OEM. Sure, there’s plenty of new product being pumped out by the lift truck vendors, but that pump is primed more these days by changes in the customers’ business than by what marketers think they can sell. Take it from a marketer.

According to Jonathan Dawley, vice president of marketing for Nacco Material Handling Group (NMGH), Wal-Mart is focusing its supply chain strategy on building smaller, “boutique type” distribution operations with 25,000 sq ft footprints rather than the 200,000 sq ft facilities of the past. The idea is to better service strategic regions.

“The influence of rail is growing,” he says. “Even 3PLs are looking at how they can locate their operations along the rail line to service the regions.”

For companies looking to expand into larger distribution spaces, space and energy efficiencies go hand-in-hand. They want to make best use of their square footage while leaving plenty of room for future growth. Kuna Foodservice, for example, worked with its local Jungheinrich dealer to apply moving-mast reach trucks that enable operators to make better use of the cube and better use of energy as they go in and out of spaces cooled to various degrees of refrigeration (see Foodservice Forklifts for Freezer and Fridge).

European Influence Gaining Traction

Those changes could stimulate growth from a DC perspective, adding more new buildings to the landscape, and whether large or small, requiring a lean management orientation to make best use of time and space. That has important implications for lift truck vendors. Will companies relocate their existing equipment, or will they need more equipment? Maybe these facilities will require lift trucks designed for shorter runs and more condensed storage operations. Maybe that means more emphasis on reach trucks or even very narrow aisle (VNA) equipment.

U.S.-based lift truck vendors are seriously considering such maybes, even paying more attention to European trends than they have before. After all, that’s what drove Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America Inc. to establish a manufacturing and distribution agreement with Germany’s Jungheinrich lift trucks a couple years ago. Jeff Bowles, product line manager at Cat Lift Trucks, notes that what was seen at this year’s CeMat Material Handling Show in Germany was noticed by lift truck vendors in America.

“Very prominent at CeMat this year was the use of automated carts to work in sophisticated very narrow aisle applications, specifically freezer applications,” he says. “Instead of using a turret truck [the exhibit] had a high density storage facility analogous to a drive-in rack or a gravity flow rack where automated carts went in, selected pallets and brought them back to a reach truck.”

Bowles sees this automation trend as both a threat and an opportunity for material handling equipment dealers in the U.S.—in that they need to catch up with the growing acceptance of automation by their customers.

“We’re in an era of innovation because [lift truck vendors] are stuck in the same boxes and the trucks are stagnant in the same dimensional footprints,” he says. “We have to find other ways to improve our practices and that’s why technology right now is in the forefront, whether it’s automation or different energy sources that allow us to start to shrink that box that is a lift truck.”

Automated Operations

Lift truck dealers didn’t have to go to Germany to get that message. The same rumblings of lift truck automation could be felt in Chicago, where at this year’s ProMat attendees saw a Crown PC 4500 Series pallet truck equipped with automatic guided vehicle routing from Dematic. Using Dematic’s voice picking software, an order picker can do his job while this vehicle is automatically directed to each pick zone.

Similarly, The Raymond Corporation announced a collaboration with Seegrid to develop automated lift trucks that integrate vision guided technology — “Guided by Seegrid” — with Raymond lift trucks for both man-on and man-off functionality. The lift truck learns the individual steps of the operation it will be performing, guided by vision—not lasers, tape, wires or additional infrastructure. However, what makes this arrangement more attractive to the market isn’t all that technology as much as the comfort factor of applying it via a familiar service infrastructure—the dealer network. But why now?