Toyota Forklift Video Case Study: Stemco

00:08 Speaker 1: Stemco is dedicated to safety. This focus is reflected both in the commercial truck products it makes, as well as operations at its manufacturing facilities.

00:17 Speaker 2: We make wheel end oil seals, that’s the main product line. We do a lot of other things. Anything to do with the wheel and the truck, we can make it.

00:27 Speaker 1: Its manufacturing facilities, like this one in Longview, Texas, are rugged environments that need forklifts with the power and durability to assure production keeps running 24 hours a day. That’s why Stemco chose Toyota forklifts. There are 14 vehicles in the fleet here that perform a variety of work. They bring raw materials, such as these heavy steel coils, to metal stamping operations. They also feed parts to assembly cells and pick up manufactured goods when work is completed. Toyota forklifts also load and unload delivery trucks. Recently, Stemco acquired several three-wheel electric forklifts. With their tight turning radiuses, these trucks are designed for movement in narrow spaces. Utilizing these trucks allowed Stemco to add pallet racks for temporary storage near its shipping and receiving docks.

01:22 Speaker 1: The forklifts also transport these heavy dyes used in metal-stamping operations. The dyes are stored in two separate buildings, so the trucks must navigate outside across uneven pavement. Additionally, the forklifts pick up scrap metal from various operations for recycling. The metal is taken outside and dumped into large recycling bins. Working in such rugged environments is a challenge for any forklift, but these Toyotas are designed for this kind of work. The problem though, was that they were facing damage as a result of driver neglect and abuse, running into racks and overhead doors, hitting potholes outside, bumping machinery.

02:05 Speaker 3: We started seeing just a lot of carelessness, brackets being bent, forklifts being driven in locations they didn’t need to be; just a lot of physical abuse to the forklifts, but a lot of safety items, lights, forks, back-rests, just a lot of heavy steel that was being abused.

02:27 Speaker 1: That carelessness was adding up. During a six-month period in 2016, repairs to the vehicles as a result of this damage totaled $66,000.

02:39 Speaker 3: And that’s money that’s not budgeted for, that comes straight off of their bottomline.

02:48 Speaker 1: Stemco’s Toyota dealer in East Texas, Lift Truck Supply, recommended that the company add T-Matics COMMAND, Toyota’s vehicle management system, to 10 of the 14 trucks in its fleet at Longview.

03:01 Speaker 3: It gives us real-time. It tells us that there was an impact at any time that the impact happens. It tells us the severity of the impact, it tells us the operator. What’s nice about it, it tells us instantly that something has happened that put that forklift in an unsafe condition. It may email supervisors, it’ll email safety coordinators, it’ll email the dealers.

03:27 Speaker 4: I think there’s much more accountability with the system we have now. Each driver logs in with a unique passcode. And that gives them a little bit more sense of awareness that they need to pay attention to their surroundings and be careful when they’re driving the lifts.

03:48 Speaker 1: T-Matics provides a wealth of data to track both productivity and safety.

03:54 Speaker 2: Who uses the truck and how they use it, how often they use it; are they using it in a safe way, all that kind of stuff. We’ve had a drastic drop in the kind of incidents we had when we were having damages done to the truck. That’s helped a bunch and also, in keeping with that, we’ve had less damage to facilities like overhead doors, and racks. And since we put the telematics on, those kind of problems have gone away.

04:22 Speaker 5: Alright, all you wanna do now is a visual check, you wanna check your tires, you wanna check your seatbelt, your seat. You wanna check the horn.

04:36 Speaker 1: In addition, T-Matics guides drivers in conducting safety checks before starting their shifts. An onboard display guides them through the pre-check list. Their responses are stored electronically, eliminating the paper checklist previously employed.

04:52 Speaker 6: There was opportunities for improvement, just keeping a paper checklist on a forklift that goes indoors and outdoors throughout the day; sometimes they would get wet, ink would run. I’ve gotten good feedback so far. A lot of the full-time drivers have a much easier job at maintaining records.

05:11 Speaker 7: I do that, I like the idea of the checklist monitor that we have here, which all you have to do mainly is log on. There’s no paperwork, there’s no anything else, it’s just automatically done. It’d ask you a question, you answer your question. “Yes,” “No,” “Unsafe. It needs to be inspected.” If it needs to be unsafe, it’ll stop the process, you will not be able to move the forklift at all.

05:39 Speaker 2: They check all of the tires, the forks, they check the operation of the truck, the brakes, the horns, the lights. They do a visual inspection on it to make sure there’s no damage done to the truck before they get on it. We have 19 different things that are checked on the truck, and we also thought that telematics was a good way to help us ensure that we were doing our pre-checklist before we got on the trucks, to make sure that we were doing that and keeping records of it.

06:14 Speaker 1: Between the reduction in damages, improved information on truck usage and the assurance of safety checks, Stemco has already seen a significant return on their investment in T-Matics. But more importantly, the company has assured a safer working environment for everyone.

For more information contact us at:

Lift Truck Supply
T:1.800.873.1828
E: marketing@short-pear.flywheelsites.com
F: Contact Page

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