Tom Andel

Night of the Living Forklifts

People in my private life wonder how I can keep a blog going about lift trucks. They can't think of a more boring topic. Yet here I am posting two blogs a week, finding a wide variety of neat angles. I guess I'm like that weird little kid in "The Sixth Sense," remember that movie of a few years back where Bruce Willis walks through the whole film as a ghost and doesn't even know it? The only ones who can see him are the audience and this haunted little kid, played by Haley Joel Osment. The famous tagline from that one came about when the kid whines to Willis "I see dead people!"

Well, I see lift trucks! They really are everywhere, but nobody else seems to notice them. They hide behind the scenes of our everyday lives--at the big box stores we shop, on the receiving docks of our grocery store chains, in those cop vs crook warehouse chase scenes in the movies we see every weekend, and even in the newspaper articles we read every day.

Just the other day, the April 29^th edition of The Wall Street Journal had a big story in Section B with the headline: "AeroVironment Sees Its Strength in Defense Market." Aerovironment caught my eye because I know what they do in the lift truck world: fast charging. But that aspect of their business was overshadowed in this article. Sure, the company is making hand-launched unmanned aircraft that save soldiers' lives, as the company's CEO, Timothy Conver, was quoted. But how many readers noticed Conver's other quote, buried toward the end of the piece: "We can charge a battery in about the time it takes to fill the gas tank of an SUV."

If The WSJ is smart, they’ll start digging up such buried treasure and giving it headline treatment. Readers like you and I are buried in the Recession and looking for ideas we can use to dig ourselves out (lots of dead people imagery in this blog, isn't there?)

Hey, WSJ, are you reading this? I doubt it, but if there’s a writer over there as geeky as I am, here’s a hot story for you: "Automated lift trucks are coming!"

If you saw my last blog, you know how intelligent attachments are getting. Well, now the big names in MH systems automation are getting into the act by automating forked vehicles. Of course, Modern's ProMat coverage this year talked about J.B. Webb’s SmartCarts, among other moving innovations designed for the plant floor. But with manufacturing struggling for survival, automation providers are looking to a sector that has more life in it: warehousing and distribution. Just the other day HK Systems announced its “Automate the Conventional” program, where fork-equipped AGVs can now interface with existing material handling equipment and technology, even work in conjunction with manual lift trucks servicing rack systems.

If you were at this year’s ProMat you might have even heard Larry Mahan, co-founder, president and COO of Sky-Trax, talk about this phenomenon as the next big trend in lift trucks. Here’s what he told me just this week:

"The economics that will make this take off is we’re going to use standard high volume vehicle production methods. They're not all going to be built by AGV vendors who are doing $200,000 custom designs for every vehicle. They'll be built by the fork truck vendors. They'll come right off the assembly line ready to go. We don't think you'll eliminate the need for standard fork trucks and drivers. There's too much variation in material handling operations. But we do believe there are large parts of these operations that don't require a driver, like horizontal transport of pallets from the dock to the racks."

By the end of the year Mahan says a ball bearing manufacturer will be using seven specially equipped Hyster lift trucks equipped with an automation package. On the day shift they'll be driven as normal lift trucks, but at night they'll change into completely automated vehicles.

Spooooooky! Told you I’m a weird little kid.

Tom Andel,
tandel4315@aol.com

Posted by Tom Andel on April 30, 2009 | Comments (0)