60 Seconds with Michael Field, CEO of Raymond Corporation

Michael Field
The Raymond Corporation
Title: President and CEO, The Raymond Corporation
Location: Greene, N.Y.
Experience: Field has been working in automated materials handling since 1997. He joined The Raymond Corporation in 2004 and has been president and CEO since 2014.

Modern: Raymond just celebrated two milestones: The 100th anniversary of the founding of the company, and the induction of George Raymond Sr. into the Logistics Hall of Fame for his patent on the double-faced wooden pallet some 84 years ago.

Field: It’s an affirmation of the original patent. The elegance of the double-sided wooden pallet is that all these years later, it’s still the basis for the unit load. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to go vertical in the warehouse, or even have narrow or very narrow aisle storage.

Modern: The pallet is the backbone of the lift truck industry. Do you know how it came about?

Field: George Sr. always had an interest in helping customers move materials. Before the lift truck, he came up with patents for different types of trolleys and lift tables. There’s an old story that he got the idea for the lift truck from a barber chair. He was getting his hair cut and watched the barber lift and lower the chair. He asked if he could buy it so he could take it apart and see how the lift mechanism worked. The barber wouldn’t sell it, but he rented George Sr. his second chair. That’s how the lift truck came about. People were already using skids, single-sided pallets, but he then came up with the idea that if we had some way of moving a stackable unit load it would be much more efficient. And, that’s how the double-sided pallet came about. It all started with a haircut.

Modern: That was a long time ago. Is there awareness of Raymond’s contribution to the industry within the organization?

Field: There’s a mural in one of our main hallways that depicts the patents he generated over the years. And, for the 100th anniversary, we have a replica of the original barber chair. The pallet and the hand pallet truck are in the front hall. It’s a reminder that we’re celebrating 100 years of innovation, service and progress.

Modern: My inbox is filled on a regular basis with emails from companies predicting the end of the wooden pallet. Will it ever go away?

Field: Will the percentage of shipments on pallets change? Sure. But, if you go to Europe and Asia, you see a number of uses for pallets, and we’re now seeing smarter pallets that are used for tracking product through the supply chain. The double-sided wooden pallet is just so simple and efficient that I don’t think it’ll ever go away.

Modern: Let’s shift gears. Since pallets and lift trucks go together, what excites you most about what’s next for lift truck technology?

Field: The thought process today is optimize, connect and automate. At Raymond, we’re trying to understand and improve our customer’s processes to apply lift trucks in the best possible ways. That’s optimize. The connect phase is where we tie in iWarehouse to get more data and analytics to improve the processes. And finally, we’re finding ways to automate to make operators more successful, whether that’s mild automation or full automation. It’s all about the process.