Executive Summary
The Customer: A Fortune 1000 Global Food Company
Challenge: Concentric was tasked with designing a forklift power system that would optimize productivity and minimize costs for a new, greenfield facility.
Solution: This customer wanted to leverage their best practice material handling processes at the new plant. They knew that historically they’d over-engineered, putting in too much equipment for their “greenfield” facilities. Concentric had already created and implemented successful GuaranteedPOWER® systems for some of the customer’s other facilities, greatly reducing their overall equipment while extending asset life. This included onsite power technicians at two other locations, cloud-based power management, batteries, chargers, and fixed costs over a 4- to 5-year contract life. The customer asked Concentric to apply those existing application experiences, learnings, and data to develop a customized material handling power system for the global food company’s newest facility.
Results: Concentric’s prescriptive power management platform laid the foundation for a solution that streamlined operations and optimized productivity at the customer’s new facility. As a result, the customer was able to reduce the amount of equipment (including forklifts!) that they purchased to run the material handling processes in this facility. In addition, GuaranteedPOWER® took the risk out of the assets’ life, extending it for the full 5 years and ensuring they realized the same performance efficiencies in year 5 as in year 1. This partnership reduced and locked in a significant cost reduction estimated at 30% while maximizing productivity.
The Details
The Customer
A global food company with farms, production/packaging facilities and distribution centers in North America, Europe, and Mexico. Overall, their facilities process over 15 million pigs a year; meat-processing is a particularly demanding, high-volume operation, with strict FDA, cleanliness and safety requirements—all managed on an around-the-clock schedule. They operate in wet and cold conditions, notoriously difficult conditions for operators and material handling equipment.
The Challenge
The customer approached Concentric to design a power system from the ground up for their new, high-velocity facility in Maryland. Previously, Concentric had designed and installed new power systems in four other plants after conducting extensive power and operational assessments to determine each facility’s specific needs. Since those efforts had been so successful, the new plant wanted Concentric to help implement best-in-class material handling power practices from the start, rather than having to retrofit over time.
The Solution
The goal was to enable the leanest material handling system possible that could deliver ongoing uptime with the plant working at maximum capacity. All at a safer, more sustainable and lower total cost of ownership. Concentric leveraged their existing power management data for every application/process the customer operates at the other plants to help them build the most efficient material handling processes possible. As with the other plants, once the power and maintenance solution was agreed to, Concentric's national installation team took on project management and coordination to install the system. Once live, they equipped the onsite technician team and executed a training program with the forklift operators to get them ready to launch. From there, the technicians support day to day operations with a proactive maintenance model driven by our RAAMS(R) power management system.
The Results
By implementing a proactive power and maintenance system designed to identify issues before they occur, this global pork producer was able to deploy their leanest fleet on record utilizing their existing application data/models. This busy facility is still able to meet all material handling needs—even during peak demand periods around the holidays! Plus, Concentric’s best-in-class technology allows for ongoing and proactive management of the forklift fleet by alerting the tech about potential problems. This allows intervention so minor problems don’t cascade into bigger issues. This puts the customer into the driver’s seat to have complete control at a lower total cost.
Having too many batteries can be costly and wasteful; an optimized number of batteries means less maintenance, fewer repairs and fewer square feet of precious warehouse space devoted to a battery room--it can also deliver an improved experience to the forklift operators and department supervisors.
In many cases, optimized data is the missing piece that can help design and optimize a power system from the ground up. In this case, it was even more imperative as the customer was building the material handling processes and power system from scratch—leveraging hundreds of contract years’ worth of GuaranteedPOWER® data ensured they built the system without any unnecessary waste.
If you’re facing some unique challenges and have demanding requirements, Concentric can help by designing and managing power and maintenance systems to deliver efficiencies and reliability. Click the link below to let us know if you want to discuss a Free Assessment with one of our Sales Engineers today!