Samantha Taylor: Welcome to the Amigo CartCast, the podcast where we roll through the ins and outs of material handling with Amigo Carts. I’m your host, Samantha Taylor, here with my co-host Scott Chappell, and we’re on a mission to find a better way for material handling.

Scott Chappell: Thank you, Samantha. Each episode we’ll explore the innovative features, success stories and the endless possibilities that Amigo material handling carts bring to the table. Let’s roll into a world of efficiency, innovation and endless possibilities. This is the Amigo CartCast.

Samantha Taylor: Welcome to this episode of The Amigo CartCast. We are here today to talk about how to right-size your fleet with amigo material handling. I’m Samantha, your host, along with Scott, co-host.

Scott Chappell: Hi Samantha.

Samantha Taylor: Hi. So this is-

Scott Chappell: I’m excited to be here.

Samantha Taylor: I’m excited as well, and this is a hot topic of understanding how to right size your fleet. So in the material handling world, there are, of course a lot of fork trucks, forklifts, heavy duty application. And what we want to share is how to right-size your fleet and integrate Amigo units to help with that. So one thing that we like to say or we’ve seen oftentimes is when we go into facilities, you have heavy duty fork trucks that might be carrying one little itty bitty baby box.

And does that make sense? For our listeners, there’s probably a lot who have seen that They’ve experienced it.

Scott Chappell: And do you know why they do that?

Samantha Taylor: Because that’s all they have.

Scott Chappell: That’s the only way they’ve done it. They only do it because that’s how they’ve done it in the past. So they don’t know a better way.

Samantha Taylor: Yes. And Scott shared that story with me early on when I was brought on to our industrial team, and I kind of giggled. And then it wasn’t even a week later, I believe we were doing a local show, an open house at one of our dealers here in Michigan, and I can’t even make this up. I looked over to a gentleman who was hauling like two trash bags on a fork truck and I was like, “I have something that could work better for you, sir.”

But that’s all they had and that’s all they know.

Scott Chappell: So then not to help you out here, but then why would somebody want to do that? Why would somebody want to take those two bags off that fork truck and put them on something else? I mean, just why? I’ll tell you why. Because when we go into many facilities, nobody has enough fork trucks. And then the workers are like, “Where’s the next fork truck?”

And management is, “This is the most expensive product in this warehouse. We don’t need more fork trucks. We just need to free them up.” So the reason I ask that question to you, Samantha, is we could have freed up that fork truck and that day with those two bags of garbage on one of our products could be our Dex Pro+ with a 30 by 50 inch deck.

So what we could do is basically allow them to take their current products, the current amount of fork trucks they have, and they could use them in different areas and free them up with our products.

Samantha Taylor: Yeah, when you think about efficiency.

Scott Chappell: Most definitely. And you think about cost. You talk about safety.

Samantha Taylor: Not only initial costs, but maintenance costs too.

Scott Chappell: Yeah, because I don’t know this for a fact, but I believe that they’re charged – I don’t know if it’s per hour or per what for each fork truck. You folks out there listening would know better than we do, but I think that’s all associated with those costs. So that is one way to free up what they currently have and they don’t have to buy more.

Samantha Taylor: Yeah. Another thing that you had mentioned was safety. So I think a big concern that we’ve heard through experience is just the safety of fork trucks. Not only do you have to be properly trained and ensure that you have safe operators, but when you see a fork truck in maybe a small or congested area, it doesn’t make sense.

So can you share a little bit about how our material handling carts can help improve safety in a facility?

Scott Chappell: So you make a real good point, and we hear this when we go – and your 100% correct when you say we’ve seen this, these are all from our experiences. These are from our over 700 visits since 2017 in these warehouse facilities. So not that we’re the expert on these fork trucks, but we go into these facilities and we hear what people tell us.

But you’re 100% correct. There’s a concern that a fork truck might be in a congested area where there are people that are walking and safety is a huge deal right now. So they might be able to use our product in the congested area and keep the fork truck in the area that is deemed fork truck traffic area. And that’s where the safety – that’s where one of the safety things come in is that area.

Samantha Taylor: I think that in another point of like, you have to have trained users, so it might be a great way to get somebody in the door to understand the systems of your facility using the Amigo units first in those maybe more congested or tight areas and then elevate or graduate, if you will, to a fork truck operator.

Scott Chappell: Most definitely. And the other thing about four trucks are there are standards, whether it’s OSHA or whatever governing body it is, they have to be trained on those products. And then with our products, what we’ve seen so far, because we’ve had a lot of fork truck dealers that have OSHA trainers on staff because why wouldn’t you, right? You’re selling a product.

You need to train the folks that kind of look at our product, like, I don’t know if it’s the speed or the size, but they kind of look at it like it’s an easier product to operate from the start. Probably less training than somebody that’s driving around a product that is heavy and could potentially hurt somebody if it was driven improperly.

Samantha Taylor: Let’s do a little icebreaker. Real quick. What do you call a forklift that hauls pigs?

Scott Chappell: I don’t know.

Samantha Taylor: A porklift. That’s good.

Scott Chappell: I like that.

Samantha Taylor: Yeah. And we might not be hauling pigs, but –

Scott Chappell: Yeah, I agree.

Samantha Taylor: We’ll haul the bacon.

Scott Chappell: I think probably the – I think the message we really want to do in this podcast is just let folks know that our products work with other products in the warehouse, and we are not going to eliminate those products because those products are there to do certain things. For example, if you’ve got a five rack high warehouse and you’ve got to get something off the top rack, we’re not going to do that because we’re not lifting anything, people.

Samantha Taylor: We’re not Spider-man either.

Scott Chappell: We – exactly. We are just driving things from point A to point B. So what we’ve tried to do when we’re out and about and demo-ing on these products is say, how do these products complement what you currently have? That’s the first thing. The second thing is maybe these lesser expensive products will allow your more expensive products to be more efficient, or possibly maybe you purchase a lesser expensive product that does some things that the more expensive product does, and you might change the way you do some things in your facility.

Once again, we talked about it just a few seconds ago, a few minutes ago. Safety is a critical thing and it’s only when you go to a facility that they know, right You go into a warehouse and you demonstrate your product. They know if they’ve had any incidents, they’ll never tell us because why would they? But they know where safety – the importance of safety.

And that just kind of fits into their specific facility.

Samantha Taylor: So why don’t we share with our listeners because I’m sure a lot of people are wondering at this point, “This sounds great. I would love to free up some of my work trucks. I want to understand how an Amigo unit or maybe an entire fleet can help efficiency in my facility.” How can we get that to them?

Scott Chappell: Well, it’s funny. We always want to do demonstrations. We call it the Amigo Roadshow. And that basically consists of driving our van full of products. We’ve got a ramp, we unload those products, we do our demonstration. We can show our whole line: Max Pro, Dex, Dex Pro, Dex Pro+, Dex HD! There they are. Were you tested me on that?

Samantha Taylor: I wanted to make sure you’re paying attention.

Scott Chappell: I got you.

Samantha Taylor: You did great, A+.

Scott Chappell: Thank you. But what we do is we show up, and we unload these products, and we demonstrate them. And then what happens is these folks at that point, who’s ever there, they see how they operate, and then they’re we’ll start turning to say, can we use it here? Can we use it there? How does it make something more efficient?

Maybe it can’t even be used at all. And then you know what we do, Samantha? You’re supposed to say what.

Samantha Taylor: What?

Scott Chappell: Oh, thank you. We load up our van and we go on to the next one. So if somebody listening wants to see how these products work in their facility, it’s a simple deal. It’s a phone call. We set up a demonstration. Now we do sell these products, offer these products through local distributors, and they could be a fork truck house.

It could be a conveyor house, it could be a castor house, could be rack and shelving. But that’s what you’d want to do, is reach out to your local distributor, who you’re currently using today with a relationship, and set up a demo. You know what we say is? We say you set it up and we will come.

Samantha Taylor: We will show up.

Scott Chappell: We will show up. That’s better yet.

Samantha Taylor: You set it up. We will show up.

Scott Chappell: I like that. You set it up. We will show up.

Samantha Taylor: And it is a product that you truly need to see to understand all the benefits. It’s small but mighty.

Scott Chappell: Most definitely. And not to talk too much about product because a lot of times we can just jam the product all the time. But it’s a small footprint, it’s a safe speed. It charges by plug it into the wall, very minimal service. I mean, those are all those things that you will see if we can come in and do a demonstration.

Samantha Taylor: So I remember on our last road show, we met a group of forklift operators and we asked them about their job and they said it was very uplifting. I think they had a sense of humor.

Scott Chappell: I’m sure they did, and so do you. So regarding talking about improving efficiencies in a warehouse, I think that fits right in our theme as a company. How do we – you know, our theme is Improving Lives Through Mobility. Well, in this particular case, we’re improving efficiencies through mobility at a potential warehouse. And that could be one of two things.

One is it could also improve safety at the warehouse because we’re using a smaller product in an area, or two, is there larger, more expensive equipment that they have, now it’s more efficient, might be saving them some money and they’re just using them in a better way.

Samantha Taylor: We want to end every episode with a story on how we’ve been able to specifically Improve Lives Through Mobility. So last time you shared the cardboard story.

Scott Chappell: Oh my gosh, I’ve got so many stories.

Samantha Taylor: Got to think of a story maybe specific, if you can think of one specifically to – that you can remember.

Scott Chappell: So there is a very prominent plumbing, let me see, faucet manufacturer, they’re out of Tennessee. And they have 750,000 square foot warehouse. They have maintenance folks that are doing a fire extinguisher PMs on a daily basis. In my world, I’m thinking – “it’s a fire extinguisher…” It’s a bigger deal than that. I get it. No disrespect to that. Long story short is they were walking to every one of these fire extinguishers.

We aren’t anywhere close to seven or 15,000 square feet. And I believe the last count we had was over 100 fire extinguishers. And we’re probably, I bet we’re 75-80,000 square feet here in Michigan. So if we have 75 to 100 or 100 of these in Michigan, can you imagine how big seven or 15,000 square feet has?

So they take our Dex product with a basket on the back, six miles an hour to get there quicker. And now they do all of those PMs. Now, what’s cool about this is before they had this product, they had no clue that they could do it quicker. Now that they have it, they’ve bought I think they have four or six now.

So this things grew. They first bought two, now they’ve got six and it’s standard operating procedures now.

Samantha Taylor: So when you see these things I have two points, first is an analogy. It’s kind of like heated seats in your car. It might seem like a luxury item, but once you have it, you don’t ever want to go back.

And then the other thought I had was rather than walking, we see a lot of facilities that use maybe a maintenance tricycle that needs a lot of repairs doesn’t last as long. It still requires a little bit of work. Our product just kind of fits in nicely – and it’s fun to ride. You jump on, you buzz around, you get the job done, and it’s just a unique way to help your employees do their job more effectively.

Samantha Taylor: That concludes this episode of the Amigo CartCast and how to right-size your fleet. I hope you enjoyed the content today around integrating Amigo units into your current material handling fleet.

Scott Chappell: Hopefully you’re looking forward to our next episode.

Samantha Taylor: Yes, hopefully you are looking forward to more episodes. If you would like to see some additional content and how we have been able to improve efficiencies, be sure to visit our website at myamigo.com/industrial. And also visit our website for the podcast, which is myamigo.com/podcast and subscribe to your favorite podcast channel.

Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, keep it rolling.

Scott Chappell: Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor: Until next time.

Scott Chappell: Keep it rolling.