DC Velocity - November 2015

inbound

Oct. 15 was an unusual day in Columbus, Ind., a small city best known for its modern architecture and displays of public art. For one thing, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, and a host of Japanese dignitaries were in town. For another, the factory where Toyota Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Inc. (TIEM) builds Toyota-brand forklifts completely shut down that afternoon, and its 1,500-plus employees could be found outside on the lawn or seated under a circus-sized tent.

The occasion was the commemoration of the plant’s 25 years of operations in the U.S. The event also highlighted TIEM’s $16 million-dollar expansion and building renovation—the 14th expansion since the plant opened in 1990. The 50,600-square- foot addition will increase the facility’s size to 1.1 million square feet of manufacturing and support space, including room for new manufacturing technology and product development. The expansion includes a two-story office building, a new cafeteria, a new storm shelter and locker room, and additional space for Toyota’s on-site medical center for associates and their families. The new building will also serve as headquarters for Toyota Material Handling North America (TMHNA), the North American division of Toyota Material Handling Group.

The plant expansion comes none too soon. Sales continue to grow, and TIEM earlier this year presented the 500,000th lift truck built at the Columbus plant to customer Rock Tenn, the giant paper company. The company has launched eight new products in the past two years, including three in September 2015 alone.

Logistics professionals face unique challenges every day in moving perishable cargo such as food and medicine, but few freight categories present as many challenges as blood. Blood demands even tighter control over temperature variation than is provided by standard cold chain logistics because the cargo can spoil in mere hours.

That was a persistent problem for PHI, a Lafayette, La.-based company that provides air medical transport and medevac operations. For years, the helicopter crews had no good way to transport blood, forcing them to make special trips to blood banks when a patient needed a transfusion.

Recently, PHI found a solution in Series 4-EMT carriers from Pelican BioThermal. These passive thermal control carriers can keep critical blood supplies at safe temps for up to 48 hours. Now, blood can be taken along on even the longest medevac flights, allowing paramedics to provide emergency room-level treatment for patients even in remote locations.

Toyota celebrates 25 years of lift truck
manufacturing in U.S.
Thermal container helps save lives in the sky

Want to be a UPS delivery driver? You’d better be good at video games!

Aspiring UPS truck drivers who attend the company’s new Integrad training school in Menlo Park, Calif., will learn their trade through a series of high-tech simulations. The site is outfitted with a range of teaching tools, from 3-D driver simulators to a mock-up version of a small town, complete with realistic touches like street signs and houses.

Atlanta-based UPS designed the new computer-assisted training course to match the way young people learn in an increasingly computerized culture, working with education specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and the Institute for the Future. Drivers who attend the new UPS Integrad facility will follow three steps of training in a “teach me, show me, let me” progression. Drivers first learn the company’s driving and service methods, then see how the methods work, and finally practice them in a hands-on fashion.

Attendees use a mixture of three-dimensional computer simulations, webcast learning modules, and traditional classroom instruction. When they reach the practice stage of driver education, they enter “Clarkville USA,” a mock neighborhood that challenges drivers to solve the same challenges they will confront in real-world parcel pickup and -delivery routes.