Some people are snobs when it comes to the brands they buy. Debates can get pretty passionate about who makes the best beer (if you’re a guy) or shoes (if you’re a gal). But when it comes to cars and lift trucks, men and women seem more practical. While style is nice, the brands most closely tied to safety and serviceability tend to do best with everybody.

But while interviewing industry sources for an article on lift truck fleet management for MH&L’s upcoming September issue, one of them told me something that made me go “hmmmm.” I’ll share this proposition with you in hopes you’ll tell me if you agree:

When it comes to rental, branding isn’t a factor.

Now guys don’t rent beer (although I remember Archie Bunker disputing that statement after exiting his bathroom in one of the funnier episodes of “All in the Family”) and women don’t rent shoes (except for bowling), but rental is very common in the world of cars and forklifts. And where forklifts are concerned, rental has actually been exploding lately because companies have been holding off on new purchases and they’ve been renting to compensate for seasonal business surges. But when they rent, do they care what brand of lift truck they get?

Bruce Pelynio doesn’t think so. He’s president and CEO of Heli Americas, the Memphis, Tenn.-based U.S. representative for Heli, a leading lift truck brand in China. He told me his company has been doing well renting to managers of large fleets because rentals don’t have the mystique of a certain brand.

“It’s seen as a forklift,” he said. “The same as a car rental agency. If you rent a midsized car from Avis you don’t know if you’re getting a Chevy or a Buick or a Hundai or Kia. You get a mid-sized car. The same with these guys. When they rent they rent a 5,000 pound pneumatic and the customer doesn’t get to specify what they want, they’re renting a capacity.”

While you ponder whether generic is good enough where lift truck rental is concerned, I’ll throw you one more thing to ponder: What if you could rent an operator along with the equipment? When you throw humans into the mix, it’s hard to keep your rental transaction generic. People tend to be unique components.

I’ve heard about the concept of renting an operator/lift truck combo for a few years, but it’s always seemed to be more popular overseas than here in the U.S. Is the surge in rental changing that? Nick Adams, business development manager for Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America (MCFA) had an interesting answer:

“Where renting an operator as well as the equipment would have the best chance of success is if the lift truck provider sticks to its core competencies, like providing the asset and seeing to its proper maintenance, and if it partners with a personnel service company whose core competency is hiring and evaluating employees, and handling liability insurance.”

So, what would you think if your lift truck dealer partnered with a Kelley Services to provide an asset with maintenance and an operator?

Adams told me that conceptually it may sound good but those partnerships would have to be worked out carefully on paper—and that’s where these efforts have lost steam when pursued in the past.

Let me know how the idea of renting a Ray on a 5,000 pound pneumatic compares to that of renting a 5,000 pound Raymond for your own Toms, Dicks and Harriets.

As part of the Baby Boomer generation, I grew up during what they called “the Space Age,” when TV shows, movies, comic books and other forms of popular culture were obsessed with the idea of humankind not only reaching the Moon, but all the other planets, and points far beyond, as well. One of the more fanciful ideas back then was a comic book hero known simply as the Space Cabby. The basic premise was so simple as to be pure genius: Like any other working hack, the Space Cabby drove his fares to wherever they wanted to go, the hook of the series being that he drove a small spaceship instead of a four-wheeled motor vehicle. The Space Cabby series didn’t last all that long, but it was certainly memorable.

So flash forward 50-some years, to this headline in a recent Wall Street Journal: “Private Space Taxis Race to the Launch Pad.” The article describes the launching of a new era of freight transportation: cargo delivery via a commercial spacecraft. Later this year, according to plans, Space Exploration Technology Corp. (SpaceX) will send one of its Falcon 9 rockets up to dock with the International Space Station (ISS). Last year, as the WSJ points out, SpaceX was the first company to launch and recover a space capsule from orbit.

SpaceX’s initial efforts will be unmanned, though the plans are to institute manned cargo delivery flights in the near future. According to Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, the price of a standard flight on a Falcon 9 rocket is $54 million, and the average price of a full-up NASA Dragon cargo mission to the ISS is $133 million.

The market could be opening even more quickly for SpaceX, given the crash of a Russian cargo spacecraft scheduled to deliver supplies to the ISS. The Russian Progress supply ship, which was carrying nearly three tons of fuel, oxygen, food, water and equipment to the six astronauts currently stationed on the ISS, malfunctioned shortly after blast-off and crashed in a remote area of Siberia.

As the WSJ reports, “[The] failure underscores the importance of beginning to use U.S. commercially developed rockets and cargo capsules to supplement Russian re-supply flights. Since NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles this summer, those are the only two options to handle frequent shipments of supplies to the station.”

While currently generating the most buzz [pun intended], SpaceX is but one of a group of commercial operations looking to get a piece of the lucrative post-space shuttle era of space exploration.

So the idea of commercial “taxi” drivers hauling freight and passengers up into space is no longer just a goofy idea for the comic books. It’s the opening of a whole new logistics frontier.

UPDATE: According to an article in the Guardian, those space cabbies will soon have somewhere besides the International Space Station to deliver their fares — space hotels. By 2016, for roughly $1 million (600,000 pounds), rich and adventurous types can take a space taxi up to an orbiting hotel (though it sounds more like a glorified dorm room) for a five-night stay. The world of “The Jetsons” is getting closer every day.

UPDATE # 2: Hard to tell if this is serious, or just some kind of publicity stunt, but Domino’s Japan claims that it has plans to open the first pizzeria on the moon. Considering that the current population of the moon stands at 0, it’s not quite clear who will be buying these pizzas, let alone who will be making them. This definitely falls into the category of “don’t hold your breath waiting for this, but it’ll be pretty cool if/when it happens.”

As this article in The Telegraph points out, Domino’s calculates that the transportation costs alone will amount to more than $7 billion. That’s a pretty steep price, especially when you consider that the company itself made only $2.5 billion in 2009 in total global sales. But as The Telegraph article also makes clear, Domino’s is still smarting from being one-upped a decade ago when Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to the ISS, so it can be assumed that Domino’s believes that long-range — and long distance (make that looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong distance) — planning might help win some new customers if and when the moon is actually colonized. It’ll be nice to know, at least, that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will have somewhere to eat when they pay a visit to the moon.

If waking up to the newspaper’s headlines about economic malaise makes you want to go back to bed and assume the fetal position, here’s a pick-me-up from ThomasNet’s Industry Market Barometer (IMB), a semi-annual survey of buyers and sellers of industrial products and services. In its latest report, the IMB profiles Field Fastener Supply Company, headquartered just outside of Chicago. This industrial products distributor was one of 3,370 companies that responded to the survey. It is celebrating its second consecutive year of double-digit growth by building a new warehouse that will more than double the size of its facilities. The 45,000 square feet it is adding will be filled with newly purchased capital equipment and populated with new hires.

According to ThomasNet, Field Fastener is just one of many companies preparing for growth. In fact nearly half (45%) of respondents to its IMB survey reported growth over the last 6 months of 2010 and the majority (88% of respondents) are confident in their future expansion.

Expansion during this economy takes guts, but to me, the most gutsy thing these companies are doing is staffing up for their futures. Field Fastener, for example, is hiring for positions across the enterprise, from engineers to warehouse personnel. Brandon Plock, Sourcing Team Leader, is quoted as saying these investments reflect the company’s confidence in continuing its double-digit growth for the long term.

His company has company. Among respondents to the IMB Survey, 43 percent say they will hire skilled trade workers, 36 percent will hire line workers, and 35 percent will bring in engineering staff.

Why is that so gutsy? Because their search will not be an easy one, according to a couple other reports that just came out. For example, while McGladrey’s Summer Manufacturing & Distribution Monitor indicates that the manufacturers it surveyed say they’re feeling pessimistic about the state of the U.S. and global economy, the majority still plan to hire in the coming year. Apparently they make a distinction between what’s outside their control (such as the U.S. and global economies, rising commodities prices and other key risk factors) and what they feel falls within their control—i.e., whom they choose to hire.

According to McGladrey’s spring and summer surveys, a majority of manufacturers said they planned to increase the workforce by an average of 7%. Respondents who said they increased their productivity seemed especially likely to do more hiring. In fact they are also more likely to be investing in workforce training.

Training and education are the new survival skills of this era, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers report titled “Achieving Excellence in Production and Supply.” This report states that CEOs worldwide are citing a lack of key skills as the hottest issue on their agenda.

“Managing talent has overtaken risk as top of the CEO agenda and two thirds report that lack of the right skills is their biggest talent challenge,” the report says. “Manufacturing is no exception and companies in many different countries report shortages of suitably qualified science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) qualified workers.”

The report also identifies softer skills that seem to be in short supply—things like problem solving and team working, that are needed for collaborative working up and down the supply chain.

If hiring talent is on your to-do list in the next few months, PwC suggest you ask yourself the following questions first:

• Are your assessment of skillset requirements and your people development and recruitment activities keeping up with the changing needs of your customer and supply chain strategies?

• Are you making the appropriate investment in in-house development packages and future talent programs?

• Do you have metrics in place to assess the return on such investments?

• Are you making the most of ways in which you could reach up the future talent supply chain and collaborate with schools and universities?

• What are the opportunities for shared initiatives across your supply chain or with other companies in your sector?

This is not only a good checklist, but it will ultimately be a good test of your company’s resolve to surpass this economy’s “New Normal.”

I’ve seen enough science fiction movies to know that autonomy and robots don’t mix. The next step beyond autonomy is these things developing a sense of self. Once that happens, we’ll be living the plotline of “The Planet of the Apes, ” only with robots becoming our masters instead of Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall (I’m an old-school Apes man).

Yet autonomy is just what manufacturers in the service and combat robot markets are shooting for. An article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Robots: America’s Newest Soldiers, ” said that robotic vehicles in the battlefield will have to work more autonomously, without someone sitting at a control panel or manipulating a joystick. No Problem. The CEO of Northrop Grumman says that’s just a computing power and systems engineering issue, not of technology fundamentals.

So he believes he’s mastered the fundamentals. Didn’t Victor Frankenstein believe the same thing while he was stitching together disparate pieces and parts?

Even the makers of service robots—like those robotic vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers you might have read about in Popular Mechanics—see autonomy as the ultimate means to market acceptance. Prettiness will have to come before that (as Frankenstein failed to learn), but that’s happening now, according to EUROP, an organization that describes itself as the “European Robotics Technology Platform, ” and an “industry-driven framework for the main stakeholders in robotics to identify common initiatives and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in robotic R&D and global markets. ”

In its report on the recent European Robotics Forum in Västerås, Sweden, EUROP says there’s a potentially vast market out there for service roboticists to address. The aging population is one. There’s already a “Care-O-bot, ” specifically developed for elderly care, and already able to fetch, carry and do some simple household chores. Cost is the only obstacle these kinds of robots will have a tough time rolling over, but until they do, EUROP says there are countless niches to exploit. Two are particularly ripe: industrial assembly and distribution.

So as those applications ripen, will we see robots in the plant or distribution center gradually become self-aware, realize what they’re doing and join the millennial generation of humans in steering clear of these jobs? If they were really smart and self-aware, they’d perfect the art of selling themselves—as one component in a system of interdependent components. That seems to be a talent many of technology’s human creators have yet to master.

According to George F. Brown, Jr., co-founder of Blue Canyon Partners, a business consulting firm, he’s heard from clients who’ve had trouble understanding how their products synched up with other components as a system in their customers’ industries. In a recent executive survey his firm conducted, one particular respondent summarized the problem many businesses have:

“We thought our responsibilities were tied to our products,” this person said. “This too was off the mark. More than half of the service calls we got were associated with something that was at best peripheral to our products, some not in any way linked except in the minds of our customers. But we had to learn the larger systems in which our products were operating, and be able to steer our customers toward a solution to whatever problems they had. It just wouldn’t work to say that the issue wasn’t our issue – we tried that a couple of times and learned quickly never to do so again.”

That’s the kind of self awareness technology providers in material handling and logistics are busy mastering so they’ll survive our new economy. A system really is more than the sum of its fundamentals. I just hope their counterparts making combat robotics for the defense industry develop the same kind of system awareness and avoid making Frankenstein’s mistake.

From ground turkey to Tylenol, within the last few months we’ve read about products that had to be recalled due to some kind of contamination. In the case of Tylenol, we’re talking multiple recalls—for the same problem: reports of a musty, moldy odor linked to the presence of trace amounts of a chemical known as 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA)—a chemical used in other countries to treat wooden shipping pallets.

Why can’t the supply chain professionals in the food and pharma supply chains get their acts together and find a way to keep tainted products from reaching the marketplace? Well, according to a recent research note from the Gartner Group titled “GS1 Standards Gain Traction Toward Improving Healthcare and Life Science Supply Chains,” they’re in the process of doing so. Unfortunately, it’s probably going to take a decade for everyone in these supply chains to be in synch—if then. It involves becoming part of a global data synchronization network. You know how hard it is for our representatives in Washington to get in synch. Imagine making that a worldwide effort. Using politicians as a benchmark, 10 years sounds optimistic.

“The primary factor for this slow pace is that changing the coding systems used for interorganizational information exchange requires coordinated IT changes that impact not only communications, but also internal applications,” the Gartner report states. … “It seems that every year we are reminded of the need for urgency, efficiency and international cooperation in the delivery of medical supplies during natural disasters or a pandemic. And every year, we have examples of either serious drug counterfeiting or dilution problems affecting both developing and developed nations.”

Unfortunately, up to now the actions to deal with such situations have been more like reactions. It seems that the companies involved start from scratch each time there’s a new supply chain crisis. They need a standard to follow—and that’s just what the pharma industry is working toward. GS1 Healthcare standards have created a universal, global identifier for products that enables the simplified exchange of data across the value chain. GS1 Healthcare has been the focal point of U.S. efforts, aligning the efforts of long-term, product data standard advocates.

But establishing standards is a long, tedious process—hence, the 10-year implementation timeframe Gartner projects. It involves critical thinking—a process that’s diametrically opposed to the knee-jerk approach many companies have been using in times of crisis. Actually, critical thinking could use its own set of standards.

A blog post I read the other day (from Majorium Business Press) took a good crack at it. It broke the critical thinking process into a set of six standards, each one being a bridge to the next. They are:

Phase One: The Unenlightened Thinker –someone who isn’t even aware a problem exists.

Phase Two: The Confronted Thinker – the realization that something’s wrong with our thought process.

Phase Three: The Novice Thinker – someone who tries to think right but without consistency—every crisis seems new (sounds like that Tylenol recall situation).

Phase Four: The Proactive Thinker - individuals recognize the importance of regular practice to improve and enhance their thinking.

Phase Five: The Developed Thinker - individuals begin to advance at a rate equivalent to the effort put into it.

Phase Six: The Mastery Thinker – This is someone for whom reflective, analytical and evaluative thinking has become second nature.

According to this set of standards, the only way you can become a mastery thinker is to start out as an unenlightened thinker who eventually becomes aware of his own ignorance—and its cost. That seems to describe where many companies in the pharmaceutical supply chain are today. It may take ten years for the pharma supply chain to fully adopt GS1’s standards, but where humanity is concerned, learning to think is a never-ending process—if done right.

When unemployment hovers between 9% and 10%, as it has for far too long now, some shall we say less-than-enlightened managers begin to think they can treat their employees as shabbily as they want. “What are they gonna do – quit? In THIS economy?”

Actually, yes, they will. In fact, according to a recent study conducted by LifeWork Search, a recruitment firm specializing in supply chain management, 70% of those polled had left their most recent employer during the first six months of this year. Of those who had left, 76% left on their own terms (i.e., they quit), and the remaining 24% were laid off.

If this trend continues throughout the remainder of 2011, LifeWork Search speculates that half of all current employees will leave on their own by the end of the year.

Admittedly, LifeWork Search’s study is more anecdotal than anything else, being conducted through LinkedIn’s poll feature. Even so, the search firm points to rarely publicized findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that close to 2 million Americans quit their jobs in May 2011. Furthermore, in a poll taken late last year by Right Management, an affiliate of Manpower Group, 84% of the 1,400 workers polled said they planned to look for another job in 2011.

What does this all mean? Why are so many people seeking greener pastures? According to Jason Breault, managing director of LifeWork Search, many employees are tired of feeling exploited. Yes, they’re very much disillusioned with what’s happening (or not happening) in Washington, but closer to home, they’re unhappy with their boss and/or their job situation.

“This year we have seen candidates finally taking control of their growth potential, leveraging frustrations in their current roles and taking advantage of the opening job market,” Breault says. “Many employees feel they have hit a wall in their current roles, yet at the same time have been pushed harder, putting in longer hours, and taking on more responsibility without being properly compensated. Candidates are now running for the door, and not just for the pay, but for a better work life balance, the ability to be with a growing company and the ability to grow themselves.”

And keep this in mind, too: What does it say about a manager if his/her employees are actively looking for another job, even knowing full well how hard it’s going to be to find one? And when the economy finally bounces back to full recovery mode, will the word have already gotten around that your company is a lousy place to work?

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Half of Your Employees Don’t Like Their Jobs

Our blog on the dangers of using lift trucks to tow heavy objects caught Bruce Pelynio’s attention. He’s president and CEO of Heli Americas, the Memphis, Tenn.-based U.S. representative for Heli, a leading lift truck brand in China. He called me the other day to share another dumb thing he’s seen done with lift trucks. Ever hear of jousting?

Early in Bruce’s career, long before YouTube started publicizing the stupid things people managed to do with lift trucks, he found out about what some of the warehouse employees of one carpet company client were doing with their rug-ram attachments. He found out because this company was calling the dealer in on a pretty frequent basis to fix broken carriage rollers.

Pelynio did a little investigating and found out that some of these guys on the third shift were getting bored and decided to start jousting with their lift trucks. You’ve seen those movies where knights in armor ride horses full speed at each other—lances leading the way. Pelynio was amazed nobody got killed doing this. In fact he asked one of those brainiacs what would have happened if his ram attachment had attached itself to his co-worker. He just shrugged and laughed.

Funny how a slow economy affects some people. I’m sure towing and jousting represent a fraction of lift truck follies going on when the manager isn’t looking. And just as a nylon tow rope will stretch only so far before snapping back to hurt you, a lot of lift truck fleet managers have been stretching their equipment replacement timeline to the breaking point. Pelynio told me many companies have been holding off on replacing their lift trucks over the last three years, and they’ve been just getting by with quick fixes and scavenging parts from other equipment.

“There are a lot of trucks in the boneyard,” he told me. “Not only were they sidelined but they were picked over like carrion for parts to keep the remaining trucks running.”

He sees a couple things happening as a result when the economy snaps back: Managers of big fleets who typically bought 100 or 200 new trucks a year will be faced with buying 600 or 700 to get back to their former level of operations. At the lower end of the user spectrum—the smaller companies who used to run, say, 50 lift trucks—they may just end up replacing what they’ve learned to live with—say, 35.

If so, these companies’ budgets and their workers will be in for a rude awakening when the economy rebounds. In the meantime, I just hope now that I’ve blogged about the dumb things underworked lift truck operators have done with ropes and rug rams that there isn’t a rash of towing and jousting uploads on YouTube.

Leave it to the U.S. Government. With the country’s debt rating downgraded for the first time ever, with the stock market convulsing in response to global economic conniptions, with unemployment still over 9% and those fabled “shovel-ready jobs” yet to materialize… what does the Obama Administration do in response? Nothing less than to impose new regulations on the entire trucking industry. Big trucks, little trucks, all trucks in between – anybody who owns truck will have to start saving their dollars (many, many dollars) to purchase new engines approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, as the EPA bids to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all commercial vehicles.

According to the White House, “Certain combination tractors – commonly known as big-rigs or semi-trucks – will be required to achieve up to approximately 20% reduction in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by model year 2018,” which is estimated to result in savings of up to four gallons of fuel for every 100 miles traveled.

“While we were working to improve the efficiency of cars and light-duty trucks, something interesting happened,” President Obama explains. “We started getting letters asking that we do the same for medium and heavy-duty trucks. They were from the people who build, buy and drive these trucks. And,” he adds, “I’m proud to have the support of these companies as we announce the first-ever national policy to increase fuel efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution from medium-and heavy-duty trucks.”

Something else interesting happened that President Obama forgot to mention: He apparently forgot to listen to independent truckers, to hear what they had to say. If he had, he might have reworded his claim of support from “the people who build, buy and drive these trucks.”

“By totally ignoring the impact on small-business trucking, the EPA has demonstrated yet another example of our wretchedly broken regulatory process,” says Joe Rajkovacz, director of regulatory affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA). “Congress should take action when they return in September to rein in the bureaucracy and push forward regulatory reform legislation that has already been introduced.”

As far as OOIDA is concerned, the EPA “made an irresponsible mistake” in its regulatory analysis when it chose to exclude the impact on those who actually buy and drive large trucks and by focusing only on truck manufacturers. While large unionized trucking companies, such as Con-way and FedEx, are cited as being onboard with the EPA’s new regs, OOIDA points out that 95% of all registered motor carriers in the U.S. operate 20 or fewer trucks.

Not surprisingly, the truck engine manufacturers themselves are applauding the new regulations. I realize that’s a shocking development – that the companies with the most to gain happen to think these new regulations are a good thing. Executives at Navistar, Cummins and Eaton, among others, had plenty of nice things to say about the tighter engine standards. For instance, Tim Solso, chairman and CEO of Cummins, says, “This regulation and the process used to establish it are a model for how government and business should work together to meet energy, environment and economic goals.”

OOIDA’s Rajkovacz, however, sees obvious oversights in the way EPA went about devising its new standards, saying that the EPA “totally overlooked the most effective fuel-savings method of all. Driver training, which is responsible for 35% of fuel economy and which costs far less than any new technology, should have been the priority.”

The new regulations, Rajkovacz adds, are “just another example of big moneyed interests working with government to protect their own bottom line. Instead of standing up for all motor carriers, regardless of size, the American Trucking Associations was out in front in their support of this regulation.”

Well, sort of. While Bill Graves, president and CEO of the ATA, did indeed come out in support of the new regs, he used the occasion to urge the passage of his own pet project – the implementation of a national speed limit of 65 mph for all vehicles. Graves also says the EPA regs are just a start, and that the government should focus on reducing congestion; provide incentives for technology that reduces idling while trucks are off the road; continue to support the EPA SmartWay program; and reform federal truck size and weight limits to allow the industry to operate its most productive and efficient vehicles. In other words, the ATA wants the government to allow bigger and faster trucks on the road.

OOIDA, meanwhile, contends that “large motor carriers use SmartWay participation in order to get compensation from shippers for appearing ‘green.’ As a result, this rulemaking does not represent any cost increase to them. All new trucks sold to large fleets were likely already either fully SmartWay-certified or had incorporated most of the certified technologies used under this rule. OOIDA believes that EPA is taking credit to over-sell this rulemaking based on a business activity that is already occurring within large fleets.

“Small-business motor carriers and owner-operators don’t enjoy this same benefit and will be forced to comply on their own dime,” says Rajkovacz.

And we’re all left to guess as to who ultimately will end up paying for these new engines, via increased shipping costs. Though I’m sure we all have a pretty good idea.

That’s the spin I took away from today’s Wall Street Journal, anyway. An article titled “Stalled Recovery Hits Productivity” implies that adding these two negatives could equal a positive. This line of thinking states that businesses have streamlined so much that they’re working their existing workforces too hard—which could be good for the job market if demand picks up because they’ll have to start hiring again.

Another recent report (from Bloomberg News) comes at the labor issue from the Information Technology (IT) side, reporting that General Electric is reversing its long-time practice of outsourcing IT. It quotes GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt as saying his company will add more than 15,000 jobs—1,100 of which will be in its Detroit IT Center alone. The article quotes Fred Hochberg, president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank as saying “Having your research and design all co-located has enormous benefits. The manufacturing process informs the engineering process and then the engineering process informs the manufacturing process.”

If these articles are right, companies are rediscovering the value of hiring and cultivating talent. They’re also getting smarter about how they’re applying IT to make that talent more productive. In an interview I recently had with Peter Thorne, managing director of Cambashi, a consulting firm that works with IT vendors, IT will play a big part in blending productivity in manufacturing with productivity in logistics.

Thorne said a material handling engineer told him that systems engineering changed his life.

“He said he could finally manage the boundaries between mechanical, electrical, electronic and software engineering,” Thorne recalled. “Until he started using a systems engineering approach to the way they responded to a project need, each of the disciplines looked at a requirement and came up with some sort of design. After a week or month they got together and then sorted out the mess. Since he and his team adopted the systems engineering approach they have been able to manage that because it meant they could structure and link requirements to each of the technologies being used. They could come back and have a project meeting and be quite systematic about who was doing what, where there were problems and they could move functions between the electronics and the software if they needed to, or even into the mechanics.”

Here’s an example from the plant floor. Think about how an ERP system makes plans. It sends instructions to the production unit on the plant floor, which then feeds data back to the ERP system which is maintaining a model of what’s going on. According to Thorne, where that’s a manual process, the people generating the plans from the ERP system think of the plant floor as a black hole.

With technology that’s available today, production machines have embedded software, so it’s being used not only to perform its primary tasks, but it’s also used to respond to inquiries from the ERP system. People won’t have to fill out data entry forms. The ERP system can find out from production machines what their current status is.

“That idea of feeding the beast in the black hole of production will go away because both sides will know what’s going on,” Thorne believes.

The black hole will be enlightened by smart technology. But you’ll still need intelligent people to deal with exceptions. IT and embedded software can’t anticipate everything that might happen in a manufacturing or distribution environment.

I think that WSJ article is right. Companies will start hiring again. And just as GE is proving them right by hiring thousands of IT people, that good news will survive even if our current economic woes continue—as long as those human resources are cultivated and invested wisely.

On August 2nd, a shuttle truck operator and a mechanic hooked a tow chain between the truck and a piece of heavy material that had fallen from another truck on an in-plant roadway. (You probably already know this is not going to end pretty.) To position the truck to hook up the chain the operator looked rearward through the open (sliding rear) door to see. As he began to tighten the chain to take up the slack the chain broke, whipping forward and flying through the door, hitting the operator in the face. The bones in his face were shattered.

I share this story with you because I know many lift truck operators like to use their vehicles for towing when the occasion calls for it. Jim Shephard knows this too, and has seen his share of methodologies as a lift truck operator trainer who plies his trade out in the real world. In fact he shared the above story with me so he could share a few of its morals with you.

Jim told me that in recent months he’s found chain hooks welded to bobcat buckets, loader buckets, and other pieces of equipment for towing or pulling material or equipment. In all cases Jim warned the people involved to remove those hooks.

Why, because big bad OSHA will come down hard on them? Well, OSHA really doesn’t have a clear policy on the use of hooks attached to lift trucks for towing. However, some lift trucks do have a tow pin mounted in the back lower section of their counterweight. What for?

“Lift trucks are sometimes used to tow wheeled buggies and or be towed (if stuck),” Shephard answered, “especially the cushion tire models when one goes off the pavement. The operator’s manual does not address towing. Our training materials have included towing and we discuss the drawbar pull rating of lift trucks. To find this out you must get a copy of that equipments specification sheet. Operators never see this sheet, although the manufacture or dealer will provide one with their proposal.”

Indeed, operators can be pretty inventive on their own when figuring out how to solve a “stuck-in-the-mud” situation. Buying a tow rope at Wal-Mart might even sound like a good idea. But Wal-Mart won’t tell you about whip angle, snap-back, connection point capability or shock loading.

Where towing and lift trucks are concerned, OSHA falls back on its material handling and storage standard, 1910.178(a)(4), dealing with powered industrial trucks. This is the paragraph that applies:

“Modifications and additions which affect capacity and safe operation shall not be performed by the customer or user without manufacturer’s prior written approval. Capacity, operation, and maintenance instruction plates, tags, or decals shall be changed accordingly.”

Now promise me, if you’re ever tempted to consider using your 8,000-pound-capacity four-wheel electric rider lift truck to tow a disabled 18-wheeler away from your dock you’ll check with your material handling equipment dealer first. Or maybe a shrink to have your head examined.