Driving Safety and Productivity with InfoHUBX Instant Forklift Visibility in Real Time
A Canadian manufacturer of cable and assemblies that cover almost all industries that require electrical conduit from transit and railways, communications and marine to renewable energy and nuclear power recently found a new home. As the industry leader in their market segment, they invested in their brand and product by moving into a state-of-the-art facility with improved tooling and new forklifts to move product. Working with their chosen forklift supplier they decided to investigate onboard systems at first to promote safety in the workplace. The dealer asked us to accompany them on a site visit and provide them with a solution. Before we could make recommendations, we needed to really understand their business and what were their main drivers for onboard options. In a detailed meeting all agreed on the following objectives.
- 1. Pre-Shift Safey Check Compliance: Achieve 100% in recorded data.
- 2. Enhance safety by detecting and recording forklift impacts.
- 3. Prevent overloading through onboard weighing.
- 4 .Reduce equipment and product damage costs.
- 5. Increase accountability and operator performance tracking.
- 6. Generate actionable data to improve training and maintenance scheduling.
SkidWeigh Plus ED3: Dynamic Options and Network Connectivity
We along with the dealer proposed the SkidWeigh Plus ED3 with the InfoHUBX information gateway. The ED3 system is the most powerful onboard vehicle management system in the material handling industry. The reason is simple; no other system offers as many options and the ability to select only the options needed. In this case the ED3 setup allows this customer to meet their above objectives with the following options. Access control using their own RFID cards that each employee enters the building with. This is not only handy but also means that all subsequent events are assigned to an individual. A key component to all 6 objectives. The ED3 also requires that all operators starting a shift complete a safety check before the vehicle can be commissioned to the shift.
The safety check is recorded along the amount of time it took to complete allowing management to create benchmarks. Once complete the system impact notification option provides detection and recording on both Low and High settings. Low Impacts warning to indicate to the operator that they are getting close to an unsafe threshold and High when that threshold has been surpassed and an investigation is required. Objective 3 saw that this customer wanted to really clamp down on overloading for obvious safety concerns with lift trucks ranging from 4,000lb reach trucks to 40,000 big pneumatics the risk was to high. With the ED3 also comes a complete weighing suite of practical and productive options. Overload detection and notification is one such option, but with the addition of the weigh scale and accumulative totaling it introduced an entire new way for this company to manage product receiving or shipping. Inventory management changed because of two things. The first is they could weigh the product at any location of the plant, manufacturing, warehouse and yard – no need to travel to find a floor scale or crane for larger conduit. The second was the introduction of the InfoHUBX.
InfoHUBX: Complete Fleet Visibility from Your Desk
InfoHubX is a dynamic information gateway that connects their material handling vehicles that are equipped with the SkidWeigh ED3’s. It provides all the critical event notification originating from the forklift as it happens. It also allowed them to create a log of product and weight that they could reference at any time. All information is displayed and or communicated through interactive LAN website portals and SMTP mail servers to keep you informed. The system utilizes RF DiGi- Mesh technology that requires no monthly fees, no wi-fi and no security risks the system is easily compatible with all networks. Easy to use InfoHUBX is very intuitive with its ‘big picture’ dashboard to provide an overview of all events registering, for the day, week, month or year. InfoHUBX also can drill down on specific data as needed. Everything from operator, truck number, and even all pre-shift safety checks for example when an audit is happening, 100% safety compliance. Another useful function of the InfoHUBX is its ability to send emails to individuals in the company on specific information or specific lift trucks as needed. This means critical events that are detected by the ED3 are not buried in data logs, but action can be taken to correct or improve. Meeting all 6 objective the SkidWeigh Plus ED3 along with InfoHUBX also provided a completely new productivity platform on how they manage product.
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