Yale exec: End users seek services, total soltions
Yale's Chance: Guaranteeing a 10% to 25% savings on overhead and operating costs through fleet management.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/1/1999
Delivering a high level of customer service and having a strong network of distributors to ensure delivery are vital to any major lift truck manufacturer doing business in North America today. Suppliers now have to offer much more in the way of total solutions for customers' forklift applications.That's the picture painted by Yale Materials Handling president Don Chance in a recent interview. From an end user's perspective, the choice of supplier is less dependent upon which manufacturer's truck is most technically advanced, more centered on services associated with the truck.
"There are a lot of good competitors in the lift truck industry," says Chance. "Increasingly, there are limited areas for technological differentiation, manufacturer to manufacturer. And the time it takes to close any new technology gaps is rather rapid," he adds. So differentiation by types and quality of services becomes very important.
More and more often, he says, customers who use lift trucks want to focus on their core business, and not worry about their forklifts. Many end user companies also have merged with other firms. As a result, their requirements for lift trucks now are on a national or global scale.
"These companies," Chance says, "demand a very high level of quality service. They want a broader vision of what we can give them."
In some instances, the customer wants the lift truck supplier to act as a professional consultant recommending and/or bringing value-added services. Or to provide fleet management capabilities for forklifts. Or, perhaps, to forge these and other customer benefits into a long-term partnership, much like Yale has had with GM's Saturn auto plant and its lift truck fleet for nearly ten years, Chance says.
"We can take over the fork lift fleet responsibility. We can minimize fleet size, and guarantee uptime. And we can reduce operating expenses," Chance says. Indeed, he maintains that Yale can "guarantee we will save customers with large fleets 10% to 25% of the overhead and operating costs of their fleet compared to the expenses of managing the lift trucks as an end user on their own."
Opportunity in OSHA regs. New federal rules for training the operators of lift trucks (see pages 40-43) open up yet another avenue to providing customers with services they require. "We see the OSHA regs as an opportunity for adding value, for improving how safely our trucks are used," Chance says. "We have been enhancing our programs for operator and application-specific training along with our train-the-trainer educational efforts."
Many Yale dealers have built classrooms as well as test and training facilities and tracks. Under the OSHA rules, an employer can contract out the required training and have the dealer or another qualified outside organization conduct training. But the employer still retains the responsibility to evaluate individual operator experience and performance.
Move to Greenville, N.C. In the planning stages for more than a year, the move by Yale from its long-time Flemington, N.J. operations to a new North American headquarters in Greenville, N.C. is now complete. "Product design, manufacturing, and marketing will all be under one roof," says Chance, noting the anticipated synergies that should result from the interactions of different Yale teams more closely co-located now.
NA trucks are hot. Narrow-aisle trucks is a market that continues to be "hot" and growing, and where further technological innovations are being pursued. The many U.S. end users in service and distribution businesses who want to maximize storage space utilization while still efficiently moving product into and out of their facilities with both NA and VNA vehicles are helping drive demand up.
Across the board, meantime, 1998 was another good year for lift truck manufacturers. "It's been a very healthy industry," Chance observes. "One of our challenges is in participating in all the opportunities that are out there."
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