BY PETER BRADLEY, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
LIFT TRUCK TECHNOLOGY
BOBCAT’S COMPACT BUT POWERFUL LOADers, excavators, and other types of landscaping, construction, and industrial equipment are pretty much
ubiquitous during construction season. Nearly all of
those products flow out of Bobcat Co.’s main production facility in Gwinner, N.D. The 800,000-square-
foot manufacturing campus includes three warehouse
buildings that range in size from 25,000 to 50,000
square feet. Production materials, which include large
steel coils and subassemblies from other Bobcat facilities in North Dakota and Minnesota, pass through
those warehouses on their way to manufacturing.
Donnie Herbst, Bobcat’s strategic materials manag-
er, says the warehouses handle about 40 truckloads of
inbound materials each day—about a thousand skids
in total. And keeping track of all that inventory in a
fast-moving operation had become a vexing problem
for the company. Its inventory management prac-
tices could no longer keep up with the rapid flow of
materials.
“We had a significant amount of error in trying
to locate product,” Herbst says. “We had used a
gatekeeper or check-out philosophy, but humans
make mistakes.” Essentially, the company relied on
forklift drivers to report where they had picked up
or dropped specific pallets. But pallets were often not
where they were expected to be, and quantities were
sometimes incorrect. “We were looking for a solution
that would take out the human error,” he says. With
some 4,000 slotting locations in the warehouses, the
manufacturer needed a robust system for keeping
accurate real-time data on every pallet.
Bobcat ruled out the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging. Previous experience with
technologyreview
Bobcat excavates productivity,
inventory improvements
The construction equipment company makes heavy-duty gains in lift truck driver
productivity and inventory accuracy with the help of some new technologies.
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