The 200,000th forklift rolled off the Nissan Forklift Corporation’s manufacturing line at its Marengo, Illinois facility in 2011. It was a Platinum II 3,500-pound Cushion I.C. model.
The company reached the 100,000th milestone in 2002, 14 years after beginning U.S. production of forklifts and material handling equipment. The point is, according to the company, that it took Nissan Forklift 14 years to produce the first hundred thousand forklifts, but only about half that time to produce the second hundred thousand.
Tony Salgado, vice president of manufacturing operations at Nissan Forklift Corporation, attributes this performance to the increased efficiency and decreased waste resulting from implementing the Nissan Production Way and Customer Service Way principles as well as the Nissan Green Program. Through these initiatives, he says, the company has improved labor efficiency by more than 28 percent, reduced internal quality defects by more than 66 percent, and reduced lead time on production by more than 80 percent.
