Material Handling Vehicles Rely on Quality Engineering

The famous philosopher Plato is widely credited for the well-known proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” You could say that same reasoning helped to shape Amigo Mobility’s decision more than five years ago to begin manufacturing mid-size motorized material handling vehicles for the industrial market.

Just as Amigo Mobility Chairman and Founder Al Thieme identified a need for helping the disabled with independent mobility in the late 1960s, so too did we identify a need for a similar solution to fill various material handling needs in manufacturing facilities, warehouses, and distribution centers (DCs).

The key to developing the company’s industrial material handling vehicle solution was mirroring Amigo Mobility’s approach to quality engineering that has made our personal mobility products so durable and virtually maintenance-free.  

Market needs drive ongoing product innovation

After selling our Amigo vehicles for a few decades to people with disabilities, we next identified a need to provide mobility-impaired individuals with more accessibility to shopping in grocery stores and other retail establishments.

After a few modifications, our Amigo motorized shopping cart went on to become the market leader in the grocery store and retail industries. Combined with our experience involving functionality and reliability in the healthcare market, as well as a strong reputation for durability and long battery life in the retail market, we knew that we had the right combination for our new line of mid-size motorized material handling vehicles.

And likewise, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, and DCs require Amigo Mobility mid-size material handling vehicles to be dependable. We always want our products to be available on-demand and to never delay work. Because they also must be functional and easy to service, we’ve leaned heavily on our decades of experience in a variety of markets solving mobility challenges which has helped us design and build the right size material handling vehicle for the industrial environment.

Engineering know-how built on five decades of experience

During the past more than 50 years, Amigo Mobility has become an expert in all things related to electric motors fueled by rechargeable batteries, the batteries and charging systems themselves, as well as knowing how to select just the right kind of wheels for the right product applications.

When we identify a problem, we work hard to find a better way to solve it. For example, in our manufacturing facility and warehouse, we often saw employee teams using a forklift to move small items, or a pushcart to manually move heavy and awkward loads.

Using the existing drive systems from our personal mobility products, along with some minor adjustments to the base frame and design, we created what we now refer to as a mid-size motorized material handling vehicle.

Mid-size is the key phrase here because these products fill the gap between large and cumbersome powered material handling equipment (such as forklifts) and equipment that’s moved around manually (using pallet jacks or pushcarts). Along the way, we also determined that a smaller, easy-to-maneuver motorized material handling vehicle was something that many manufacturing facilities, warehouses, and DCs needed, but there weren’t a lot of mid-size solutions out in the marketplace.

Sound engineering and serviceability go hand-in-hand

At Amigo Mobility, customer service after the sale is just as important as R&D and engineering are at the beginning of product design. 

When we start to design a product solution — well before the first model is even completed, let alone sold — we seriously consider the product’s serviceability and lifetime cost.  It’s imperative to us that the product must be both dependable for the end-user and easy to service.

Amigo Mobility’s deep roots in the healthcare industry — providing personal mobility carts to people with walking disabilities — really proved to us how critical those requirements are. We knew that if someone’s personal transportation wasn’t working properly, they couldn’t get around their house, to their job, take care of their family, and more.

We’ve carried that mindset throughout all of our product lines, whether we’re providing products to mobility-impaired individuals to use in their home, motorized shopping carts for use in grocery stores, or now material handling vehicles for a manufacturing facility or warehouse.

Following are just a few examples of the rigid engineering considerations that go into our material handling vehicles:

• Using the same high-quality, durable steel tubing in our vehicle frames that we rely on for our other various product lines.
• Welds used during construction based on a variety of cosmetic considerations and supplier-provided component capabilities.
• Stringent and extensive testing conducted on our products, including preliminary static FEA (finite element analysis) studies, to determine and evaluate towing and weight-handling capacities as well as a variety of associated safety factors.
• Foam-filled tires that provide a soft ride while eliminating the need to maintain air pressure, don’t damage floors and are highly durable even when driving over metal shards.

More than meets the eye

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of proven history, thought, innovative design, testing, and more that goes into Amigo Mobility’s entire line of mid-size motorized material handling vehicles. 

The best way for you to experience yourself the heart and soul that we’ve poured into our product line-up the past five years is to test drive one for yourself. Why not request a free product demo for your facility today? Once you have a chance to put it to work in your environment, we’re confident that your employees won’t want to let it go. Trust us… we’ve actually seen that happen in real life!

Learn more about the material handling lineup at https://www.myamigo.com/industrial/