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 will 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:
On this episode today, we’re going to talk about how expensive it is, or how expensive it can be, to own a business, specifically in a warehouse, manufacturing, or industrial setting. So I don’t know a better person to speak to about that with all their experience than my co-host, Scott Chappell.

Scott Chappell:
Thank you, Samantha! You are so… it must be a Friday. But it must be a Friday because you’re being super duper nice. So, what I’ve seen when I go into facilities can be some pretty expensive equipment. And this equipment all has its… it has its purpose, it has its benefits, but it can range from a forklift. It can range from a mezzanine.

It can be rack and shelving, lots of tall, long rack and shelving. And it can be a conveyor system.

Samantha Taylor:
It could also be autonomous.

Scott Chappell:
Oh my gosh, I didn’t even think of that. That is new, you’re right.

Samantha Taylor:
Top dollar.

Scott Chappell:
100%. And autonomy is out there and it’s the buzzword. When we were at MODEX this last March, oh my gosh, everybody had something like that.

Samantha Taylor:
Half the show.

Scott Chappell:
Automated, which yeah, it was huge. I’ve never seen that before in the last seven years. So that’s a good point. So the other side of the coin though, Samantha, is how can we do things in a warehouse less expensively? We don’t use the word cheaper because that’s not what this is about. But this is about how can we do things less expensively?

And I think that’s where our products come into play.

Samantha Taylor:
I’m just going to put a quick plug in here too, because we talk about how we did see at MODEX a lot of different autonomous machinery, as well as all the more expensive equipment that you just named. The lead time on some of these—you have to have them in facilities. They’re not going away, but sometimes the lead times can be up to almost a year long.

And we’ll speak a little bit about what our solution is with our product to get into the facility to kind of alleviate some of that.

Scott Chappell:
That’s a good point. Back when COVID hit, there was a huge lead time on some of the larger equipment, and fortunately for us, our lead time increased a little bit, but not a lot. But, you’re 100% correct. And you know, the other thing about lead time, Samantha, is what does that do? For example, let’s say you need some products to move things around in your facility, and it’s going to take an extra ten weeks to get it.

What do you do in that ten weeks? How do you keep people working? So that’s a… I would have never thought that. I thought I knew it all, but obviously I don’t.

Samantha Taylor:
Keep you on your toes.

Scott Chappell:
Yes, you do.

Samantha Taylor:
Yes. So rather than having our audience wait on pins and needles, they want to know all the answers to lead time.

Scott Chappell:
Or cost.

Samantha Taylor:
And costs.

Scott Chappell:
Gotcha. So lead time—first of all, if you don’t know, for anybody listening, we are a Michigan company, Great Lakes State. Been here since 1968. We are very, very, very proud of that. So what does that mean to you on the other end? That means that our standard lead time is four weeks. Four weeks—it’s not two-day Amazon delivery. It’s four weeks, which really is not too bad.

Samantha Taylor:
Well, yeah. And absolutely, because we make all our products to order. So semi-custom, if you will. We want to make sure that the right product is going out to the right customer. Not Amazon two-day quick, but four weeks for a custom-built item, it’s pretty darn good.

Scott Chappell:
In this space that we’re in, this industrial material handling space, I think anybody listening that’s a dealer or anybody that is an end-user that’s bought something and had to wait, I think they would go, “Four weeks? That’s pretty good.” And the other side of it is the cost of investment, right? What are the costs of our products now?

We’ve had multiple podcasts. I don’t think we’ve gone into specific pricing, but our products range from roughly $3,200 to just under $5,000. And the nice thing about that is in conjunction with your warehouse, you know, your specific warehouse, you know what you’re doing. But what we found is in some cases, we’re able to minimize the expense to move things differently than what they’re currently doing.

Let me just go into that a little bit deeper. One is, for example, we’ve talked before about fork trucks and the fact that somebody might be using a fork truck to move a smaller box or a couple of smaller boxes. In this case, you might be able to free up a fork truck to haul other things to improve efficiency on that end.

Whereas our products, our 30 by 50 decks with 1,100-pound capacities, will allow you to move the smaller stuff differently at less of a cost than your bigger equipment.

Samantha Taylor:
So that’s specific to price cost. We also talked about saving time.

Scott Chappell:
Yes.

Samantha Taylor:
So price is important. But how also could we save time?

Scott Chappell:
So a couple different ways we can do that. We have had customers send us pictures of the toolboxes they mount on our Dex Pro+. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s our largest deck product that we can mount these toolboxes on. Before they had our product, their maintenance staff was pushing these toolboxes throughout their facility. Only you know how big your place is.

So if it’s 20,000 or if it’s 200,000 or if it’s a million, what is the time savings if you mount that heavy toolbox on our product and ride around your facility, rather than pushing that? That’s the more difficult side to show, folks, because if you’ve got two products next to each other and one is X amount and the other is less than that, you can say, “Oh, that’s a savings.”

How do we show savings on this specific case here? And let’s use a maintenance person for an example. Right. If we can take and supply a product for a maintenance person that saves one hour a day—okay, we hear a lot of these maintenance folks are putting on 20,000, 30,000 steps—if we can save one hour a day, that’s five days a week.

That’s five hours a week. That’s 20 hours in a month if it’s a 4-week month. That really can be calculated to be about $1,000 savings for that company, for that one person, and that one product. We’re telling our folks, Samantha, about a maintenance person saving potentially up to $1,000 in a month when our products range from 3,000, 3,200, to just under five.

I mean, if we just do simple math—I’m a simple guy. It’s a simple product. We’re a simple company in the middle of a cornfield.

Samantha Taylor:
That’s right.

Scott Chappell:
But if we’re going to do simple math, that can be a savings within six months, under six months.

Samantha Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Chappell:
I am not the accountant at a company. I’m not the CPA at the company that talks about saving money. But I will tell you, I think probably an ROI or a savings or a paid product in less than six months—I got to think that’s going to be a win for their company.

Samantha Taylor:
Yeah. No, I think that those are really great ways to show an ROI on our product. So thank you for sharing, Scott. Do you have maybe a real-life example, someone that has told you how our product has been able to show that ROI in a facility?

Scott Chappell:
It’s funny you ask that. It’s amazing because it’s almost like I have one. We were in Pennsylvania, and the company—I won’t say who it was—but it was a door company. They had an employee who was a warehouse supervisor that just came off knee replacement. In this specific case, they were interested in our Dex Pro+ because it allowed them to move the gentleman and a load on the back end.

What was so memorable about it is that there are two memorable ideas. One was he had been with the company 20 plus years, so he was a keeper, right? He’s not somebody that you’re just going to go out and replace being the warehouse supervisor. So the fact of the matter is he had an injury, came back from knee replacement.

One is they wanted to get him back to work. Right. So that was critical. Two was they wanted to keep him. Three is with this product that they purchased. And the memorable thing was they wouldn’t let us take it. We had to leave it there, which messed up the rest of our week. But that’s another story.

But the other thing was, they had calculated the amount of savings by having him back to work and by having him go through their whole facility on our product that they felt that they would pay this specific person back within three months. That would be the ROI because he’s back to work. He’s saving steps. And also the amount of money they invested would be returned that fast.

And that’s just what they gave us, right? They told us that information, and that’s what they did it for. So that was pretty memorable for us.

Samantha Taylor:
Absolutely incredible.

Scott Chappell:
Yeah. It was just another way to improve efficiency in the facility.

Samantha Taylor:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing. We appreciate your stories, and until next time.

Scott Chappell:
Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor:
And that wraps up another episode of the Amigo CartCast. We hope you enjoyed this exploration into finding a better way for material handling with Amigo carts. Be sure to subscribe as well as go to myamigo.com/podcast to see pictures and videos mentioned in today’s episode.

Scott Chappell:
Thank you for tuning in, and until next time, keep rolling with Amigo.

Samantha Taylor:
Until next time.

Scott Chappell:
Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor:
Keep it rolling.