The industry leader of brick manufacturing in North America with the most quarries, production plants, and distribution centers throughout the US and Canada was looking to improve safety. With the recent amalgamation of several smaller independent brick companies, the corporate organization was faced with setting safety standards across a broad network of facilities and looking to standardize at best. Concerned with limiting damage on the forklift and more importantly preventing the possibility of an injury as a result of careless vehicle operation, operator accountability was first on their list of driving results. The process before we started working with them was that operators were able to select available forklifts in a mixed fleet with no record of assignment. The travel cycles between the plant and the distribution yard are quite long and unsupervised and safe travel is dependent on operators making the right decision along the way. However, unacceptable was the fact that trucks would have significant damage, usually discovered on the pre-shift safety check on the subsequent shift. When inspections were performed to determine cause, the answer was always the same no one saw anything.

Understanding a need for a culture change and driven by a joint effort between operation management and corporate safety coordinators they decided that it was time to drive the accountability to operators themselves. Already a user of the SkidWeigh ED2 lift truck scale, and working with the local dealer we were able to sit down in the boardroom and discuss exactly what they wanted. Key for the customer was to know exactly who was on the truck when an event occurs, also important is the ability to determine who was operating the vehicle when that impact occurs for purpose of post impact analysis. Based on the discussion we were able to introduce to them the IM series impact management systems that provide both of their key objectives as well as some benefits they were not aware of. The IM series comes complete with a safety platform that automatically walks an operator through a pre-shift safety check and records it for due diligence purposes. In addition, only IVDT can integrate an on-board lift truck scale with an impact management system reducing additional indicators for the operator and streamlining both installation and training.

Once the decision was made to go ahead a simple installation process of 2 hours by their regular technician was all that was required to put the unit into operation. Programing their operators into the system took another 5 minutes then configuring the impacts and vehicle numbers a total of 10. Now when an operator is required to use a vehicle they are required to sign onto the machine with a personalized passcode. From their the IM series records every event from the pass or fail of a safety check to the recording of an impact that comes from unnecessary force the vehicle is experiencing from normal operation, such as hitting racking, driving to fast over train tracks or counterweight bumping in the yard. In addition, with integration of the lift truck scale the ED2 systems were upgraded to the ED4-IM and therefore not only able to weigh product, but also detect overloading as well. With all events recorded on USB and sent wirelessly to a web page portal both the operation managers and safety coordinators are on top of their fleet.