That’s right. For a culture of safety to catch on, don’t prioritize it. Value it. Safety must become part of an employee’s—and a company’s—value system. Here’s the difference:

A priority is something that changes due to outside influences and demands. A value is something that outside influences can’t change. You may see coffee as a priority, but if getting a cup would make you late for an important business meeting, you’ll skip it. However, if showering and shaving would make you late for that meeting, chances are you’ll be late because good hygiene is a value. A value backed by a strong system of social sanctions.

John Zeigle, a consultant with Value-Based Safety, says employees tend to fall into habits that prevent them from seeing risk. That’s traditional. And traditional safety is reactive. It’s waiting for something to happen before doing something. It’s the attitude, “If OSHA makes us, we’ll do it.”

But OSHA won’t help you be safe, Zeigle told his audience during a session at last week’s Material Handling Logistics Conference, hosted by HK Systems (now Dematic) in Park City, UT. Prior to OSHA, 37 people were killed on the job every day, he noted. Today, 40 years since OSHA began, 14 are killed every day. Sure, OSHA made a difference early on, but that improvement eventually slowed and flattened and workplace fatalities have stayed pretty constant in recent years. So not only must safety be a value within every company, but it must be a value held by every company’s officers.

“Companies must understand the link between safety and profit,” Zeigle said. “Do the right thing and workers comp and medical costs will go down. But management must establish goals and expectations…show visible involvement…discuss safety regularly. Talk about what workers are doing right as well as what they do wrong. And reward people for doing the right thing.”

That doesn’t mean financial rewards. It means instilling a feeling of accomplishment. Ron Pote, Zeigle’s partner at Value-Based Safety, noted that financial rewards will come later, once an organization’s people are engaged in ensuring a safety culture. He cited a study showing that such firms enjoyed 27% higher profits.

“Set a standard of accountability,” he suggested. “It’s the same for kids as it is for employees. Focus on safety every day.”

But don’t frame it as a zero tolerance program. That makes supervisors responsible for safety. People will do the bare minimum to stay out of trouble. Get buy-in. Self responsibility is key. When success goes from “No one got hurt today” to “Look what we accomplished today,” that’s when safety will have become a value. It will be part of business, not a thing unto itself.

I never thought material handling and logistics were rocket science until I met an astronaut. I didn’t have to go far to do that. He was in the same room I was earlier this week, listening to a presentation on batteries for industrial vehicles. It was at HK Systems’ – I mean, Dematic’s – Material Handling and Logistics Conference held in Park City Utah, that I met Jerry Linenger. He was the lone American on a 5-month mission aboard the Russian Space Station Mir in 1997. It was bad enough being away from his wife and family all that time, but a fire aboard the space station required him to not only think strategically, but also to think about the prospect that he might never see his family again.

So here was this retired United States Navy flight surgeon and NASA astronaut who holds doctorates in both medicine and research methodology, as well as dual master’s degrees in systems management and health policy, sitting in on a conference session on industrial batteries. Why?

Well, the fact that he was the speaker at the Conference’s luncheon a couple hours later was one big reason. Still, he didn’t have to attend any of the sessions that morning. He could have just made his speech, taken his fee, and ran. Or, he could have sat in on another session held at the same time that seemed to be a better match to his experiences in the NASA space program: “Understanding and Balancing Project Management Risk,” presented by an MIT professor.

But no, here he was, absorbing all he could about lead acid batteries, NiCads, lithium ions, and fuel cells. Why?

Well, aside from the fact that astronauts owe their life support to space-age battery technology, scientists in general and astronauts in particular are curious lot. They like to compare notes about what they know about something to what other professionals know about that same something. During this session, he heard Mats Herrstromer, HK’s battery specialist, detail the pluses and minuses of the different energy sources available to power automatic guided vehicles and lift trucks. Here were some of the key takeaways:

Although lead acid batteries aren’t as energy dense as other power sources, they are the lowest cost and most available. Sealed lead acid batteries cost more than flooded lead acid but cost less to maintain. Nickel-Cadmium batteries are good for more charge/discharge cycles, but again, more expensive. Lithium-ion have three times the energy density of lead acid, and manufacturers promise a 10-year life, but Mr. Herrstromer suggests we wait until they’ve been tested for ten years in lift trucks and AGVs until we buy into that promise. And fuel cells? Too expensive, he said. The hydrogen infrastructure is too undeveloped, and they’re not yet sized for peak usage applications, he added.

Bottom line: Until the automotive world brings the cost of lithium ion batteries down, lead acid will probably still be the way to go in terms of cost and availability.

When it came time for Jerry Linenger to make his after-lunch presentation, he covered some of the strategic and tactical challenges of conducting science in space, but he also told this audience of logistics professionals from all walks of industry about the importance of meeting business challenges with the same passion as those challenges that are life challenging and life changing. Hearing him talk about the fragility of life support in space and how he coped with it made me understand why he might want to broaden his knowledge about power sources—even those as seemingly mundane as found in lift trucks.

I won’t go into the details of Dr. Linenger’s talk here. He did present a probing question to his audience, however: If you could view the earth from space, would you feel big or small? You can read about his life-changing mission in two books: “Off the Planet” and “Letters from Mir: An Astronaut’s Letters to His Son.” But I got an even sharper glimpse of his character when I saw him later that day, sitting down to dinner with representatives from Shaw Carpeting, Dematic clients, talking about the challenges of the carpet business as well as the challenges of raising a family.

I don’t know whether Dr. Linenger felt big or small while looking out the Mir’s window at all of us 13 years ago, but I know what I saw when I watched him soak up all the science and fellowship he could at this logistics conference. Character. And it was larger than life.

Natural disasters and disastrous economies have something in common: they bring out itinerant contractors. These are the guys who go door to door offering to repair damaged property in the wake of a tornado or flood—or when they hear people in a neighborhood lost their jobs and can only afford the cheapest labor if they need to have something repaired. The timely offer of a quick fix under those circumstances is hard to turn down.

What if what you need repaired is a lift truck?

There are itinerant specialists for that too. They may not be the kind of scoundrels who go around taking advantage of circumstance’s victims, but the value of the services they provide can be just as questionable.

Jason Bratton has seen an increase in this kind of itinerant lift truck labor in the past couple years. He’s vice president of business development for BEB Industrial Asset Management, a firm which specializes in the care and feeding of equipment fleets. He sees every bill that comes across his clients’ desks, and he knows when they‘ve done business with such service people. Many of these people are great mechanics, but without a dealer organization behind them, they’re limited in what they can offer a company that uses newer equipment.

“These technicians [let go by their dealerships] are stuck,” Bratton told me. “No jobs out there in that market. So you see a lot of them try to maintain their relationships with old customers. Get one good account and it funds enough to have a business.”

They probably won’t have the diagnostics, though. It’s one thing to carry a crescent wrench and a screw driver, but another to buy a laptop and the proprietary software they need from Toyota, Raymond or Crown. Without such high-tech diagnostic tools, the labor hours rise and the parts these guys bought at retail-plus have to be marked up again for their own profit. Soon a $100 part costs $200 and all of a sudden the $50 labor rate this guy quoted doesn’t look so good when a three hour job takes five hours.

So if your maintenance operation is running lean and mean and your lift trucks are on life support, beware of itinerant mechanics who don’t have the support of a dealer organization behind them. They may mean well, but their service could prove to be a disservice.

Crown Equipment Corporation has taken the next step in its entry into the internal combustion engine lift truck market with the introduction of its Class V pneumatic tire C-5. The company said this new model is designed to eliminate the frequent maintenance, excessive downtime and shortened lifespan that limit operator productivity in heavy-duty outdoor applications.

Will this message resonate with heavy construction and other markets that were hit hard by the recession and are just starting to think about reinvesting in capital equipment again? Andy Smith, marketing product manager for Crown, believes it will, despite the fact there is still a glut of equipment available to lease and rent.

“As you drive along the freeway past these rental agencies I’ve seen an abundance of Class V type lift trucks in their yards,” he told MH&L. “That’s our challenge. It will take time [for these markets] to get out of this. But we have our brand name which helps, as well as our aftermarket support and vertical integration.”

Smith believes acceptance of the C-5 will not only grow, but it will open a door to new markets for Crown’s other lines.

“We’ve entered a lot of new industries with this product, [approaching] companies that haven’t heard of Crown,” Smith said. “So there are new opportunities for us to take our Class 1 products into these new industries and gain a stronger foothold.”

He believes brick yards provide a good showcase for the pneumatic C-5’s capabilities. One of the company’s test trucks was used in such an environment, and the test was whether the equipment could withstand an environment filled with sand and gravel. The owner at this site said they had trouble keeping their old lift trucks moving. They’d get stuck in the gravel and radiators would get clogged. Brake problems are also common in such environments.

“It was amazing to hear their brakes were getting clogged up every three weeks and they couldn’t get the braking power they needed,” Smith explained. “Thirty days after our truck was introduced they were still clean.”

Smith added that Crown had the opportunity to develop its IC trucks with a fresh set of eyes, adding features such as on-demand cooling, which is featured on equipment used in agricultural markets.

“The unique challenges of indoor and outdoor heavy-duty applications require a different type of forklift than what the market has grown accustomed to using,” said Jim Dicke III, Crown’s president. “The breakthrough features of the C-5 will change a pneumatic forklift operator’s expectation for performance and productivity.”

If you want a peek at the future of our transportation infrastructure, look no further than an automated conveyor system. That’s Dan McNichol’s view, anyway. This nationally recognized expert on the U.S. Interstate Highway System, and author of The Roads that Built America, was interviewed by National Public Radio recently and he said he sees highways becoming more automated in the future. Roads will sense congestion and automatically detour traffic. On-ramps will stagger cars to help maintain flow.

Sounds like a sortation system to me. But the comparison to conveyors doesn’t stop there.

“In the future, those lanes might be conveyor belts, carrying freight that are unmanned,” he was quoted as saying. “They might be truck lanes, they might be high-speed rail lines, but building up is definitely the answer.”

Did I read him right? Does he really think we’ll have long runs of conveyor carrying freight along our interstates? I called him to find out if he was serious.

He was and he is. During our phone conversation, he told me he worked in road construction in a past life and even wrote a book about it called “Paving the Way: Asphalt in America.” When working in this field, he was impressed by the capabilities of conveyor systems to haul heavy loads.

“I was talking with the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) about re-envisioning our transportation system and came across the concept of moving freight from Galveston to Houston,” he told me. “The idea is to put freight coming right off ships onto these huge conveyors—putting cargo containers off the hulls of a ship onto a system of conveyors that would run along or in the median of or above the interstates. These conveyors could be used to bridge different modes of transportation, from ship and skipping rail to move it directly to a DC.”

He doesn’t see something like this as being publicly funded, however. The most likely sources of funding would be the ports, especially those that need to get a competitive advantage over other ports.

“Any port looking to break out of a stagnant market would benefit,” he said. “It would require land between the port and the hub city. You’d want a DC that could accommodate trucks going to airports or rail picking up cargo for longer hauls.”

Sounds like an expensive proposition. But McNichol says the most expensive component of any road is almost always the land it sits on, and that the cost of something like this would be secondary to the cost of that. With the Interstate system, that land is already paid for by the states.

Matt Jeanneret, spokesman for ARTBA, told me his association has already proposed to Congress the concept of a “Critical Commerce Corridor,” that would have dedicated truck-only lanes on the nation’s highways. The association also likes the idea of “elevated” roadways built above the existing highways. The chairman of the House Transportation Committee Jim Oberstar, of Minnesota, has already said a National Freight Program is a priority.

“Seventy-five percent of the nation’s freight is carried by truck,” Jeanneret told me. “Based on government’s projections we envision truck traffic doubling in the next 25 years and trucks will still be the primary means to move freight. DOT identified over 200 freight bottlenecks around the country that cost about $8billion a year to the trucking industry and 243 million hours of lost time. That would be a good place to start.”

McNichol is obviously a big thinker. He was inspired by President Dwight Eisenhower’s ability to change everyone’s common view of roads and develop it into today’s Interstate system. That’s the kind of thinking that could inspire an industry take hold of this conveyor concept.

Why not the material handling industry? Tell me if you think McNichol is on the right path or if this concept is off-track. Now that logistics is in the national spotlight thanks to this nation’s crumbling infrastructure, it’s time for this audience to be heard.

Forget the Tea-Partier’s debate on President Obama’s religion for a moment. The real question is whether he’s converting to a technologist. His stumping for infrastructure development and business incentives makes him sound like an active reader of Material Handling & Logistics.

Probably not, but I’m sure he would love your support right now. He’s not getting much love from Republicans or Democrats lately, so it seems like he’s trying to transform himself into more of a Kennedy Democrat. John F. Kennedy was the first president to enact an investment tax credit, and now this president wants to enact 100% expensing of capital goods investments through 2011. That means an immediate write-off for purchasing a lift truck or a conveyor system, not stretching it out over several years. If this gets support on Capitol Hill it will make providers of material handling and logistics technology very happy, I’m sure.

But in the meantime, those vendors and their customers won’t be holding their breath for this dream to come true. Companies have been putting off their investments too long already, waiting for the economic storm clouds to dissipate. Barring incentives from Washington, they’re working on their own purchasing incentives, such as shortening the return on investment (ROI) for such purchases.

I wrote an article on this topic for the September issue (the premier of Material Handling & Logistics), and the message of this piece is that the soft benefits of technology are gaining substance with buyers when justifying their purchase. It used to be that the number crunchers in purchasing only understood hard numbers they could wrap their calculators around. Now even “touchy-feely” factors like ergonomics and safety are getting respect. Appropriately enough, this kind of thing is called “sensitivity analysis,” and HK Systems’ Mike Kotecki told me he’s seeing more of it among his company’s clients. It involves “what-if” scenarios.

For example, say you’re thinking of investing in an automatic guided vehicle system (AGVS). If this technology is calculated to pay back in 20 months on a two-shift operation, WHAT IF you only have to run one shift, or WHAT IF business grows and you have to expand to three shifts per day?

These kinds of questions were never considered in the purchasing department before, or they might have been ignored, but now these issues are being monetized, according to Kotecki. Other questions going back and forth between procurement officers and logistics managers include:

–What is the historical true cost to the company for recordable accidents?

–What do customer returns really cost?

–What percentage of time are employees unproductive?

–What effect do missed, wrong or late orders have on customer satisfaction data?

–What is the connection between customer satisfaction data and revenue retention?

I don’t know if what President Obama is proposing will have much impact on capital equipment expenditures. In fact there’s a good chance that even if this investment incentive does pass, the President will still be for raising taxes on dividends and capital gains next year, so hold your exuberance for the time being. In fact, hold onto your wallet, too. You and your vendors might be better off negotiating smart investments on your own terms.

There aren’t many things as complex as our country’s transportation system. And because it’s owned by a mix of public and private users, efforts to improve it have been mixed over the years. This patchwork approach to maintaining the national transportation infrastructure has taken a toll. Many parts of it a worn out, and our fragile economy is threatened by major shipping delays that could result from structural failures.

Recognizing this unprecedented threat, the Departments of Transportation and Commerce are taking unprecedented steps to forestall a crisis by reaching out for public feedback on major trouble spots around the country. They are soliciting practical and creative suggestions and solutions from the shipping public via a series of focused regional forums.

This is your chance to address DOT and DOC directly, from somewhere near your home town rather than through a Washington, DC mouthpiece. Why is this so important now? Harry Haney, chairman of the Coalition for Transportation Productivity and associate director of transportation planning at Kraft Foods, cites the Safe and Efficient Transportation Act (SETA) as an example. As I’ve noted in a previous blog, SETA would increase the weight that can be carried in a trailer by about 20%. However, this wouldn’t help much if every state had a different policy on allowable trailer weights. Even if SETA passes, changes will still be gradual because it won’t be a national mandate. States must individually opt-in to the legislation.

“SETA gives states the option to set interstate weight limits of up to 97,000 pounds on interstate highways within their borders,” Haney told me. “Further, SETA gives states the ability to restrict operation of heavier vehicles to certain stretches of highway.”

This has implications inside your four walls, too. Shippers will need to evaluate any potential adjustments in material handling equipment or practices they may need to gain the maximum supply chain benefits from this legislation.

This is just one of the agenda items The DOT and DOC want to hear from you about. While the prospect of shipping more efficient truck loads may be attractive to you, the current infrastructure may not be able to handle them until they get some much needed maintenance. The question is, if Congress passes SETA, will they also renew funding for the surface transportation bill which is currently on life support?

The DOT and DOC hope that by hearing from the public directly through these regional forums they’ll gather mightier ammunition to make their case in Washington, DC. Ronald F. Stowe was instrumental in organizing these forums. He’s the former head of government relations for two Fortune 100 companies and currently president of RFS Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm.

“Due to the global nature of manufacturing, very few companies large or small don’t get their components from multiple carriers in this country or multiple countries around the world,” he told MH&L. “The ability to ship in a timely and reliable way affects their ability to compete. To get the attention of congress requires the general public to speak up.”

Here are the locations where you’ll be able to do that:

The Southeast Regional Exchange takes place in Atlanta September 17, 8:45am to 4:00pm at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. To participate, contact Page Siplon at 912-966-7867 or e-mail psiplon@georgia.org.

The Chicago Regional Supply Chain and Competitiveness Exchange takes place September 22, 12:00 noon to 4:45 pm at DLA Piper LLP (US). Contact Ben Wollitz, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 312-494-6704 or bwollitz@chicagolandchamber.org.

In addition, in collaboration with the Ports of Tacoma, Portland, and Seattle, a forum is planned for the Pacific Northwest, to be held in Seattle on Thursday, October 28. October 2010. Contact Ronald Stowe at 571-218-5381 or ronald.stowe@gmail.com.

Finally, if you’ll be in San Diego for the CSCMP Annual Conference, put September 29th on your calendar. There will be a “Mega-Session” on the connection between national freight policy and supply chain infrastructure competitiveness. It will be a facilitated panel discussion among senior-level executives, led by Assistant Secretary Nicole Lamb-Hale from DOC’s International Trade Administration (ITA) and Tony Furst, Acting DAS for Transportation Policy at DOT. The panel will include senior executives from state government, major port operations, carriers, and shippers. Shippers have never been granted so much access to people who can actually get things done in Washington. But you have to make the next move. Get involved for your own good.

For consumers who’ve become accustomed to socializing and shopping online, the idea of walking inside spaces walled off by bricks and mortar to visit someone made of flesh and blood about buying something off a shelf or rack seems old school. Consumers have gotten used to the idea of clicking on websites to see who they like and get what they want.

Little do they care that when they click, the e-transaction they initiate is still fulfilled by teams of flesh & blood material handlers working in bricks & mortar distribution centers. Until we have material transporter rooms like they do in Star Trek, that won’t change much. What needs to change is not only the consumer’s perception of that process, but how those material handling professionals perceive themselves.

John Brandt, CEO of The MPI Group, a Cleveland-based manufacturing research and benchmarking firm, stated this clearly to me:

“Executives in material handling and logistics must reinvent their firms and their business models so that they’re seen as not just vendors of services or products, but as integral providers of the overall value delivered to customers.”

In other words, how do they remain relevant? The world of retail is no longer about just products and services. Those are only two of the deliverables in an overall value package that also contains “an experience.”

Not everybody can be a retailer, but anybody can be an e-tailer. Smart logistics service providers are figuring out “relationship commerce,” which personalizes online fulfillment by taking out the bricks and mortar middleman. For example, there’s a new e-commerce fulfillment provider called “OpenSky.” It gives consumers a more direct relationship with suppliers. By suppliers, I mean anybody– bloggers, editors, celebrities, any kind of social media personality you can name. Think Oprah, who has become quite a book seller. OpenSky helps these people create an online profile, upload product, manage inventory and have direct access to a network of sellers of those products.

OpenSky actually takes responsibility for the logistics discipline of these sellers. I asked Jamin Dick, vice president of supply and fulfillment for OpenSky, about the material handling and logistics challenges of this new online business model of his.

“It’s much harder to control our supply chain,” he said. “Getting it right means treating our suppliers as extensions of our own company. We spend a lot of time evaluating their logistics, stock management, packaging and fulfillment capabilities. When they fall short we have to act as if it’s us falling short and invest the time and money to fix it.”

The key concept here is complete visibility. OpenSky never takes physical possession of products, which means it depends on suppliers to keep them informed about their stock positions, replenishment orders and goods in transit. The company currently does business with 1100 suppliers—each with different fulfillment capabilities. OpenSky tries to become the common logistics denominator.

“One of our ongoing projects is to provide a menu of solutions for suppliers to transmit on-hand, on-order and goods-in-transit information,” Jamin told me. “On the outbound side we provide systems that automate every step of the order lifecycle. Even a small supplier can look like an EDI shop. That’s what customers expect and it’s absolutely table stakes for the kind of business we’re doing.”

Want to know the dirty little secret about this business? It’s really just good old fashioned drop-shipping. It’s where the retailer, or in this case, OpenSky, acting on behalf of its seller client, does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to the manufacturer, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. What are the logistics lessons to be learned from this e-Baying of America?

“Build systems your mother could use,” Jamin says. “Due to the inherent diversity in a drop-ship business you need systems that are very easy to use or you’ll consume way too much time training and handholding.”

OpenSky doesn’t benchmark itself against eBay or Amazon where speed of service is key. In fact, as you’ll read in our September issue via an article written by Bryan Jensen, vice president and principal with the St. Onge consulting firm, benchmarking is only effective if you’re realistic about who you are. Chasing after performance benchmarks that are completely irrelevant to your operation is a waste of time. Focus instead on benchmarks that are bona-fide targets for your operation and should be pursued to elevate it to higher levels of performance.

OpenSky does that by associating itself with assortments of uncommon goods.

“Customers are willing to wait a bit longer than they would for a Kindle from Amazon,” Jamin concluded. “So we focus on making the experience more memorable and special than trying to deliver it in 48 hours.”

An experience can be the hardest product to package. It’s also the most valuable.