Ep. #1: Challenges Facing Industrial Facility Managers

The first episode of Right from the Source features Walt Swedlick, the Director of Customer Relations and Sales Support for RightHeight. in Milwaukee, Walt sees hundreds of facility managers every year and understands the biggest challenges Today. With an eye towards safety, Walt addresses specific solutions that can increase efficiency. Well being of workers. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on productivity, energy savings, and environmental control.

Your industrial or commercial facilities.

Listeners, today we have the WrightHeight Director, Customer Relations and Sales Support, Walt Sweetlick. Walt, thanks for being on the show. Hey good morning, Ken. Great to see you again. Yeah, you too. So Walt, uh tell us a little bit about your experience, your background in materials handling. Sure. I've uh been with Right Height for the last thirty seven years. Variety of roles on the sales end of the uh equation.

uh including some time in the field with the regi as a regional sales manager. And uh for the last twenty years I've been running our customer fly in program. Can you talk about the flying program just a bit? Uh at Right we run a a very unique program. where we invite clients to uh visit us for a day, day and a half, learn more about the trends and issues

in their industries related to the products that we uh that we manufacture. Uh specifically loading docks, high speed doors, and uh some of the related products in those categories. So you mentioned industries. So I mean what kind of industries are are coming in to to see you during this flying program?

Well we're we're fortunate because we we deal with literally b anybody that loads or unloads trailers. Uh some of the larger industries that we deal with on a regular basis include uh food and beverage. Consumer products, automotive, pulp and paper, and uh certainly big box distribution, both on the retail side. and uh three PL, third party logistics providers. Is there any kind of trend in terms of a certain industry that you're seeing more and more of or less and less of?

The core industries uh have stayed the same. Certainly there's been changes, consolidation. uh the food companies, beverage companies, consumer products companies, even the automotive companies. Uh where we've seen a lot of growth certainly in the last ten years as the economy has improved is uh in big box distribution. a lot of uh uh developers involved in speculative buildings. uh in just a lot of new construction in in bigger buildings with more loading down.

So where are these potential customers or customers coming from? Uh geographically they're coming from almost every state in the union and uh Canada, Mexico, and uh a number of major foreign countries. We're we're blessed to be well represented uh literally around the world now and uh all of our distributors are encouraged to participate in the program. How does the program work? Are you sitting down with them? Do you walk them around the facility? How does that work?

We try to do our homework ahead of time, get as much information and background we can on the customer, and specifically on any projects that they're working on. However, we found that it's always a good idea to verify from the customer, hear from the customer's mouth, uh their goals and what they'd like to accomplish while they're uh visiting us. So we'll we'll typically sit down for uh half an hour to forty-five minutes.

explain the agenda for the visit and then uh really dig deep into what their needs are uh both short term and long term for some of the stuff that we do. What are some common needs that that you're hearing? at the user level, many times the people involved in making these decisions, this is a once or a twice in a career decision. Uh might happen every once every ten or fifteen years. So they wanna know what's new. They want to know what's innovative.

And they want to know what we can do to help them save money over time. Depending on the industry, do you have a kind of a set game plan and and what might that look like? Sure, absolutely. Um, food and beverage is a great category. A lot of change in uh especially loading dock layouts for food and beverage customers over the last ten or fifteen years. So a client that hasn't been exposed to uh this category i in, like I say, ten years, you spend a lot of time educating on what's changed.

what we can do better to help them pass some of their QC inspections, some of their sanitation inspections, uh, some of their third party audits that they go through. uh usually a a pretty big departure from what they've done in the past. Uh completely different uh dock layout. both from an equipment standpoint as well as uh size and shape of the dock door, drive approach and what have you.

As far as some of the big box retailers or three PLs warehouses like an Amazon, what might something like that look like? We uh we believe very strongly in never prejudging the customer. So uh we like to go deep and wide on on these visits. Most cases we've got a customer for six to seven hours. So we we we are gonna go deep and wide and we're gonna try to expose them to as many different ideas as uh possible that makes sense for for their category.

Uh with some of these big box retailers and and some of these big box distribution centers, just getting the basics down is really, really important, getting them to understand the significance of wider and taller door openings and maybe lower dock heights and Longer and wider dock levelers. can make a huge difference in in the overall efficiency and productivity of their building once it's built.

What are some challenges that a lot of facility managers do face on that day to day basis and what are they looking at when they come in during the fly in program? From a uh facility standpoint, there's a couple of things that they're concerned about. They want uh they want to be productive.

Uh they want to figure out if there's a way to get more product on a trailer in less time. They want minimum maintenance requirements, ownership r uh requirements, so lowest lifetime ownership costs is uh certainly a big consideration. And then there uh Extremely, extremely concerned at the user level about the overall safety of their employees. both from catastrophic i issues related to trucks pulling away from the dock early or rolling away from the dock unexpectedly.

As well as some of the long term issues related to uh the guys driving forklifts for the next ten or fifteen or twenty years. uh what can we do to to minimize any chronic injuries that they they might incur? Can you talk about some of those potential injuries, maybe uh long term that uh facility managers are coming to you and and asking about? Yeah, they're they're very concerned about uh back and neck injuries uh for forklift drivers.

Many people know the uh forklift, great piece of equipment, but Solid rubber tires, virtually no suspension, pretty hard seat in a lot of cases. Yeah. So imagine sitting on that piece of equipment eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Anytime you encounter a bump or a hump in the building floor, the transition between the building floor and the trailer or the trailer floor, Uh over time that really has a uh uh a tough effect on the human body.

I am not an experienced forklift driver, but I can tell you just from sitting in, you know, at at uh at the office desk for you know, eight, nine hours in a day. I mean my back hurts just from sitting there. I can't even imagine going over dock levelers and, you know, different things that you might encounter in the in a large warehouse. Absolutely. We gotta we gotta put a supercharger on your chair and let you buzz around at six or seven miles an hour through the office and see how that feels.

Yeah, yeah, no thanks. No thanks. Uh when it comes to maybe some more acute injuries and and accidents as well, I mean I we all know that the loading dock can be uh kind of a hectic place, a lot of lot of commotion, lots going on there. What are some new products that maybe are coming out? in in that vicinity that uh are helping with accident prevention. Sure. So I I think most of your listeners recognize Rayhead as a leader in loading dock safety systems over the years.

And many of those systems is have uh evolved products like dock locks and like safety lip dock levelers. What we want to do is expand that now to include every dock lock. and and uh we've come to realize that not every customer has a budget for this equipment uh especially after an accident or near miss has occurred. But there's some short term things that we can help them do. that many times will fit into even a maintenance budget or an expense budget versus a capital budget.

So we're looking at light uh systems for the inside and the outside of the building. We're looking at uh different camera options for the outside of the building. Stock and tenant can see what's going on uh uh on the outside of the building without going outside. We're doing some other neat things in the drive approach. To alert dock attendants of trailers backing into the dock.

both uh with audio and visual alarms uh on the outside. It's been very well received by the marketplace. So a a variety of different products that don't necessarily involve a big capital expenditure probably be handled through an expense budget in many cases. We can certainly Uh raise awareness.

No, you mentioned uh a c a couple things that obviously Right Height is well known for, including the dock lock there. I mean certainly uh um a a staple. Can you talk about you know, d is is there something that you really like to during the flying program go to and kinda show off and and uh you enjoy doing demos of?

I like to show uh or educate our clients on the benefits of the core products first and foremost. Nine times out of ten that's where they're gonna end up. They're gonna end up with a a core product, which is great, fine. But I get a lot of pleasure out of Taking'em out of their safety zone, if you will, mm-hmm and introducing them to new ideas. So for example extra wide dock levelers. It really opens the eyes to a lot of clients.

Uh the vertical dock level or again for that client in the food or beverage industry that hasn't looked at docks in ten or fifteen years is a huge eye opener for uh for those people. Uh some of the new dock enclosures are absolutely unmatched in the industry. Uh So that that's kinda neat. Talking about uh ways to make docs more productive is an interesting topic that uh I think many of us are just scratching the surface on at this time. What would you consider a successful visit?

What we consider a successful visit with customers coming in is uh when we've created the or built the foundation to build a long term relationship with that client. So if they uh leave and uh uh follow up with inquiries related to uh uh specifications on our equipment

Certainly orders are always great and we don't turn those down. But we we don't look at the short term as much as we look at the long term with customers that come and visit. And uh many of the clients uh have been back many uh multiple times. Uh in this day and age we've had clients move from company A to company B to company C and they've brought associates with them from their new companies to to realize the value and that those are some of the big rewards I think in the the program overall.

Those long term relationship building kinds of things, yeah. Absolutely critical in our business. Well, well I think that's all we've uh we've got for you here today. So we uh certainly appreciate you having the time to to come down and and uh chat with us on the show. Is there anything else that uh you feel like we missed and y you wanted to touch base on here? No, it was a great talking to you again, Ken. It's always a pleasure and uh

listeners, we thank you for listening. Have a have a great day. Alright. Take care Walt. If you enjoyed this episode of Right from the Source, be sure to subscribe listening platform and follow right heights Want more supply chain logistics solutions for your facility?