EP 32: An Interview with Michael Field

Fine, thank you Kevin. I'm excited for the discussion. Definitely excited to have you. You know, Raymond is so much all over the industry. And I got to see your big booth at ProMat this past year, and also I've gotten to work with your fork trucks as well in a couple different operations that I've worked in myself. So it's good to be talking to you and hearing from the man himself. So why don't you give us a little bit about you and your experience and how you've ended up at Raymond? I think you've been there for about 15 years now, correct? Yeah, sure thing Kevin. So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I went to RIT a long time ago. I started out working for a company that made air conditioning systems for Carrier Corporation. I worked there for a number of years in design and engineering and operations. I went back to school and got an MBA in International Studies as well as manufacturing engineering. Ended up working in the automated material handling solutions for semiconductors, and I did that for about 10 years. We ended up selling the company, it was a seed company for Intel. Then I came to Raymond Corporation as the VP of engineering. Long history obviously here at Raymond of making great products and being intuitive about where the market's going. So I've had a great experience here at Raymond, as you mentioned it has been about 15 years, and I've moved through a number of different management positions within the company, ending up as president and CEO now.

So Raymond was really founded in 1922 when George Raymond Senior bought the company from Lion Iron Works. The actual basis for the company started before 1900, so it's a very old company making a lot of steel-based products. George Raymond had this vision of creating a material handling company, starting with simplistic movement of materials, carts and the like, to move materials around because that was before pallets really existed. They came up with the bright idea of creating a double-sided wooden pallet that was basically a unit module that could be stacked and moved uniformly. They got a patent for that in 1939, along with a hand pallet hydraulic pallet to lift those up and move them around. Uniquely, George Raymond Senior decided to give that patent away free of use to everyone so that everybody would start to use the same size pallet. That's kind of the innovation that occurred in the beginning, thinking about not just what's happening today with moving materials but what's likely to happen in the future and how to get there. Through a number of years, they started to make electric forklifts and actually had some of the initial patents for electric forklifts that allowed you to both move as well as stack products. It was the basis around which most of the modern racking is now designed around that original double-sided wooden pallet here in North America. They continued to build out that product set, looking for higher and higher density within the warehousing, going up as well as out and sideways. It really has continued to grow and evolve material handling. Our view is that we really want to understand the challenges that our customers have and where they're trying to go. We have three basic tenets for the corporation: innovation, quality, and service. Those three tenets have been there since 1922 and remain core to what we're trying to deliver to our customers today.

Well, as you mentioned, having that best highest quality, highest performance forklift is very important, but it's also very important to understand the utilization of the product and what problem the customer is trying to solve and what their challenges are. So we spent a lot of time looking at that and understanding that, to the point where we invested a lot of time and effort into creating some world-class telematic solutions. From that, we've gathered a lot of data through that partnership with those customers to help them understand how they're operating. One of our mottos is around helping our customers run better and manage smarter through the use of data and other techniques. That's through the iWarehouse platform. We call it the iWarehouse platform, and that iWarehouse platform has evolved over time. It started as a telematic solution and now has grown into many other tool sets to allow our customers to understand their challenges better and also get to some root causes and opportunities for improvement.

Yeah, it really allows our customers to own what's happening in the warehouse, not just kind of manage it. So they can really dig into the areas for opportunity for improvement. We've also gotten into areas around data security and managing that data flow. And as you mentioned, having data is one thing, but having insights and information and directions that you can glean from the data is much more important and is what allows the 7x24 operation you need in an e-commerce driven world that we have now.

Yes, so it's becoming more global in some ways because some customers are becoming more global. The suppliers of material handling equipment now are much more than just forklift based. Obviously there's more than pallet based, there's case load based, down to eaches of the picking and shipping process. So we've all seen it happen. If you think back 15 years ago, you spent most of your time going to a store and you were the material handler from the shelf to your house. Now many of those steps are supplied by the large e-tailers out there. So all of those moves need to be orchestrated, and there's a cost for that, and they need to manage that cost to a minimum. The expectations for immediate response and quick delivery and accuracy are higher than they've ever been.

Sure, you know the concept is really as you mentioned around all of the different possible automation solutions there are out there now. Many of them being offered by startup companies really are focused on the act of automating a process. My experience as well as our organization's experience on the manufacturing side, the process of making forklifts, we learned a long time ago that automating a bad process just makes you make bad things faster. So we really don't want to proliferate a bad process if you don't truly understand it and own it and understand the triggers or the key variables in that process. So our view is born to a degree of our lean management, TPS production system in our manufacturing facilities, around really owning your process and really understanding it, working at continuous improvement, bringing in the tenets of lean management to visualize your process. All of that requires data, which we happen to have with iWarehouse, and really setting the stage for getting everyone in the company involved in understanding the business at a very core level, then getting to root cause and starting to improve. Once you do that, then you can make good decisions around capital investments for automation, around where the value is or which constraint you're trying to improve upon to automate. So you get the returns and the paybacks that we're seeing now with our Courier products and some of our automated solutions that are months, not multiple years, of return. So you really can manage your labor better or help the associate work better with some aids within a process rather than full automation.

Yeah, it's happening every day in our processes, especially as I mentioned with the iWarehouse data set. We have a team of people both in corporate as well as our sales and service centers that go out and help the customer understand their data set that's coming from their actual forklifts that's coming through iWarehouse. That helps them visualize individual operator opportunities for improvement, process flows that don't seem to make sense. We have a bunch of new products coming around real-time locating systems, which we call the Raymond Tracking and Location System, that helps you visualize where are the materials moving within the facility, where are the forklifts moving, who's on the forklift, should they be in that area, do we have traffic congestion issues. We can look at heat maps. So we can do a lot of things to help a given warehouse or distribution center visualize what the current state is, improve that, and then say, okay, do we want to take some of that labor asset or the associates that are working in this area and move them to another area where they could help a different constraint? And is there an opportunity then to put an automated vehicle into some of those very predictable processes that don't have high variability needs and throughput? That automation is really well fit for that application versus an operation that has lots of hot picks and other things that you really need a physical operator to go and make good decisions and have his rule set and be able to scale up and scale down in seconds, not at the speed of resetting an automated path or anything else.

It really depends on the operation and the data set. If an original design for a particular picking operation was done some period of time ago and they've never reset the pick faces to deal with new SKUs that were added, it can be right away. We have an offering around second level order picking that allows you to pick from two levels that really can be an optimization and get much more pick face density within an overall process. But if you haven't placed those SKUs in the right order or the right location, or your pick list system isn't set up correctly, it's not going to help you. You're going to spend too much time traveling and not enough time picking. That's really what that optimization to automation discussion is about: understanding what order we need to do things in and maximizing that pick time for the associate versus the non-value added travel time of delivering that full pallet off to shrink wrap and lane building and the like.

Yeah, so the future of Raymond that is kind of here now. We have products that are what I would call enhancing automation, like zoning and positioning that allows an operator to move from pick face to pick face at the optimized method as quickly as possible, lifting and traveling at the optimum approach. That is the first step. As we look further into the next level of automation, it's which of those processes are going to add the most value. It's interesting that you brought up training because it is one of our core beliefs that training really helps the associates do all of the right things at the right time in the best possible way. So we've spent a lot of time on e-learning. The ultimate solution there is our VR trainer, but there are a lot of e-learning modules that allow an operator to both visually as well as auditorily understand the process they're learning about or the truck driving or different feature sets. We really took on that challenge of VR along with this overall view that we can add value to the training experience of a given customer's organization. That again is around optimization before you automate. The full VR experience is targeted at helping operators very quickly understand how a forklift works. The controls that Raymond products have feel and look a lot like joysticks and other multi-function handle operations that a lot of the gamers out in the world are using already. We've been doing that for a very long time. Some of our young engineers put two and two together and said, how do we do this? This could be really cool if we could set up the operating system of the truck with a simulation port on it such that we just basically plug in a single cable and all of the operator interfaces on the truck work as they're supposed to, but suddenly you put on a VR headset and you move the handle and the truck feels as you're experiencing it visually and auditorily like the product is moving, lifting, turning, backing up. That really helps with that experience of determining if somebody is going to be a good fit for driving a forklift in the first place because you can experience man-up operation on an order picker, so you're high up in the air, and you can understand if someone is going to feel comfortable in that job function, along with helping them experience some of those other circumstances that can happen in a warehouse with aisle contention and pedestrian interaction. So just making sure that people can get to see those in virtual space before they have to encounter them in the real world driving.

So we're continuing to obviously evolve our solutions. There are numbers of areas to grow within the iWarehouse platform, which is more than just a telematics platform at this point. Relative to the virtual reality simulator, we have an awful lot of driving habit data from iWarehouse that can then be tied back to, okay, yes, you have been here for five years driving forklifts, but maybe it's been a different type of truck. We need to train you and certify you on a new truck or a different type of truck. We have the ability to do that asset management and help people understand who has been trained on what, when is their training due, do they need more training because of impact histories. That's one area that's continuing to grow. As mentioned, the RTLS solution is another layer of information that you didn't have before that helps you with that optimization, helps you at an individual level with a very much an improvement view and opportunities for better solutions from an overall standpoint within your warehouse or distribution center. It also gives you the opportunity to look across facilities. If a given customer has facilities across the country or across the world, we can aggregate that data and show different operating habits and different locations and how we can bring all of those different locations up a notch to best-in-class everywhere. There are just so many opportunities on that front, including energy storage. We've added energy storage to some of the solutions we're delivering now because of the advent of lithium ion and fuel cells. The type of energy storage is different, it acts and operates a little differently and has an opportunity to be optimized in a way that lead acid is not. At the same time, we have iBattery solutions within that iWarehouse product line that helps you manage those batteries better and can even create a virtual battery room for you. So there are just so many different opportunities that we have now for our products as we go forward, but more importantly it's for our customer. Taking it back to that innovation, quality, and service, how do we deliver upon that promise now and well into the future? We want to be a partner, we don't want to have a transactional relationship. We want to help our customers continuously run better and manage smarter.

Definitely, raymondcorp.com. You can see a lot on the website. You can also from that find your local dealer, sales and service center to help you with this journey towards optimization before you automate.

Thank you, Kevin. It was a pleasure.