Bob Trebilcock

Innovative thinking and materials handling success

In a couple of weeks, I’ll head to Cleveland for NA 2008. I don’t know about you, but I get a kick out of visiting the show.

You see, at heart, I’m a materials handling guy. I enjoy walking the floor and seeing conveyors, AGVs, lift trucks and palletizers in action. But what I really love is seeing the simple but innovative products that often lead to unexpected productivity improvements.

It’s a family tradition. Forty years ago, my dad and one of my cousins each put up a few bucks to buy a machine to make ragglesticks, a scalloped stick of wood that stabilizes a load of pipe. Now, you may never have heard of a ragglestick. Heck, I did a Google search this afternoon and couldn’t find a single photo. But in the pipe industry, they’re indispensable. The company they founded in 1968 has sold millions of them. Go figure.

I came across a couple of stories last week about materials handling products you might not ever have heard of but that can deliver big benefits in the right application.

The first was the Claw, a lift truck attachment made by Tygard Machine & Manufacturing in Washington, Pa. Tygard designed the Claw in the early 90s for a soft drink distributor that was building rainbow pallets for grocery stores. (Those are pallets with layers of more than one product.) The traditional way of doing that is by hand, which is time-consuming, backbreaking and just plain inefficient.

“As the story goes, we built a prototype unit and put it in operation in our customer’s warehouse,” says Phillip Read, Tygard’s vice president of sales. “We got a call to come out one Friday night and expected to get tossed out of the joint. Instead, they asked us how soon we could make 26 units.”

Fifteen years later, Tygard has a 93% market share. The company’s biggest competitor is a fully-automated robotic picking system, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Claw, on the other hand, costs less than the cost of a lift truck while delivering major productivity improvements. “Manual layer picking typically moves 200 cases per hour per man,” says Read. “Using the Claw, you can move 1,000 cases per hour per man.”

While the Claw is already an established product, the OptiLedge wants to be the next ragglestick, one of those oddball products that’s indispensable in its niche. It’s an L-shaped piece of plastic that looks a little like an oversized corner board with feet. Positioned around the perimeter of a layer of cartons, it unitizes a load that would otherwise be hand-stuffed into a shipping container. That allows a retailer like IKEA, which invented the OptiLedge, to mechanize the unloading of a container.

“IKEA was frustrated by the amount of time it took to unload an ocean container,” says Jeff Lamb, vice president of business development for OptiLogistics, an IKEA subsidiary formed to market the product. “But they didn’t want a bunch of wooden pallets to dispose of and there were issues with corrugated pallets. This is the solution their engineers came up with.”

Lightweight, nestable and recyclable, the OptiLedge would seem to be a natural, but it has been slow to find a market. “After three years of marketing, we’re finally starting to get some traction,” says Lamb. “We can’t name names, but we have two major North American retailers that have trials underway.”

When I’m in Cleveland, I’ll be checking out the automated equipment like everyone else. But I’m also going to be keeping my eyes out for the next Claw, OptiLedge and ragglestick.

Posted by Bob Trebilcock on April 7, 2008 | Comments (0)