Ep. #21: Rite-Hite's Approach to Smart Equipment

This episode of Right from the Source features. Right height products. And productivity. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on safety, security, and Industrial or commercial. And with us today to talk about how we can connect smart equipment for the maximum benefits in your facility, Chad Delavu, Right Height. Hi, Chad. Hi. Chad, give us your title at Right Height and tell us a little bit about how you got to to where you are at Right Height.

Sure. Uh been with Right Height uh going on twenty-five years, been in the industry almost twenty-seven years now, and uh my current title is director of product management for right-eyed products. So that is our dock lock and leveler lineup. As well as product management responsibilities for Right Height Digital Solutions, which is our new software division at Right Height, which relates to the smart equipment we'll be talking about today a little bit.

That's awesome. Before we get to that though, let's talk a little bit about things outside of work. Any hobbies or passions for you? Yeah, I I have a passion and not really applicable at the moment because uh with everybody's self quarantining and social distancing and all that. One of my passions though is creating unique experiences for people. that inspire them to live life passionately.

So that could be, you know, a really fun, uh unique outing at work where you go do something you never thought you'd find yourself doing before. Could be a just a great night out at a restaurant in a in a private setting where, you know, you've got the full attention of the wait staff or

maybe a unique experience uh touring uh rock and roll museum down in Memphis which is really close to uh you know where our our plant is down there. Just different things like that that people might not normally do when they're on their own. that inspire them to want to live life more passionately.

I love that. And even if you can connect it to work and if not, but if you can, I mean I feel like that makes it more memorable for them too. So that's it does create for great events and great memories when you're thinking back to that. awful training week you had to spend but all the f the fun stuff that you gotta do that really connected you to the people in in a sense connects you to that training or that event in a special way too. So

That might be a perfect segue here, you know. Speaking of connecting, the material handling operations have obviously gotten much more advanced in in recent years and I'd love to hear what kinds of things uh your customers are saying um about smart equipment and uh some of the trends of this emerging industry. Uh absolutely. Trend is probably the right word to use for it, but not uh I'll distinguish between a trend and a fad, right?

because I I do think that the way we're trending here with smart equipment that it is something that's going to be around that people are going to expect in the future. From a trend standpoint, what they expect in the future is going to be changing because if you think about uh let's say power windows in an automobile. You know, that was a really cool thing to have way back in the nineteen seventies or early nineteen eighties.

Well now that's one hundred percent expected, right? So I when when you think of sensors and data and and uh smart equipment in the industrial space. There are some things that the industry's doing today that I think tomorrow will become completely normal and just expected. And there are some things that are gonna be really cutting edge and that they're gonna really provide value for customers.

And that latter part really is where RightHeight's been focusing our efforts on as we develop smart equipment. Can you talk a little bit about how Right Height might define what uh truly makes a piece of equipment smart? Sure. Bain uh has done some research and

Uh they've got a nice little chart out there that kinda on different axes it it indicates what's important to customers and what's important to vendors of IIT equipment. You've got vendors out there that are saying things like hey we can put a sensor on a hydraulic tank, hydraulic fluid tank, and let you know when your hydraulic fluid gets low so that you refill it in time. And the the cust or the vendor, excuse me, thinks that that they've all of a sudden made a smart piece of equipment.

And you've got the customer on the other end of the spectrum saying, okay, so you put a sensor on a tank and you can tell me when the tank gets low. We've had that in our automobile and the fuel tank for years. You know, that really isn't cutting edge. That's not really information I can do a lot with. But if you can help me understand in my facility where I can increase output, where I I can increase throughput, how I can tighten up processes to maybe make things safer.

And you can give me analytics around changing the behavior of my people, which is going to improve my bottom line. Now you've really given me something I can sink my teeth into. Actionable information outside of just say predictive analytics or different things like that. Let's focus on really bringing that true value to customers.

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the smart equipment that Right Hide is offering at the at we'll start at the loading dock. Sure. Really the smart equipment and and if you think about it, it's not just true for dock equipment, it's true for most equipment. Is the the smart equipment really becomes smart when you can tie into a control package that's able to communicate with

Some sort of a network, right? Because once you can get that network, uh the information to a network, you can build intuitive dashboards, you can build alerts. you can uh message somebody's phone if the alert is important enough and they deem it important enough. Uh or you can just create dashboards that can be viewed on a monthly basis to see is there anything that's trending that maybe we want to pay attention to.

So uh at the loading dock, it really for right height it it comes through with our dock lock. So you either need to have a control package with a dock lock, or uh we can expand the information that we get if we use what's called our dock commander control package, which includes overhead doors, it includes light. It includes the leveler, the dock lock itself. So now once you've got a control package that controls multiple things at the dock.

All of a sudden you can start getting information off of a thing like a leveler that may not have any sensors on it at all. You can start really getting actionable information off of things like that. You can get a lot, a lot of detail, which I want to point out to the listeners, not all of it might be meaningful or actionable.

And, you know, that's something I think you want to look for too when you're looking at a vendor is you want somebody who will work with you to define the events that are important to you. and then deliver those events to you in consumable bytes and in a consumable framework or interface. so that you don't have to to go through the dashboards or the data dump into an Excel spreadsheet every month and really try to find the information yourself.

Because if that's the case, you're probably not going to take the time to go through and find those things until you need the information. So I think it's important to be working with and picking vendors that are A in the software business and help you design that stuff up front. And B deliver you that information in a way that is really easy for you to consume without having to go through yourself and try to find all the data and do all the work to find the data. Yeah.

Has has right height really been kind of planning for this evolution for the last number of years? Absolutely we have. Um in fact in 2015 when we introduced what we call our Gen 2 controls, that was the first step in paving the way for Right Height's IIT platform. So that control package was designed around the fact that, hey, we we need to make these this equipment smart.

So uh one of the things that customers kind of brought about too uh was this idea of a a loading dock management software and and how the your smart equipment can kind of integrate and and create a a better picture of what's happening at the loading dock. Uh do you want to talk about that aspect a little bit? I think that's a really good point and When we're talking about the software that Right Height has developed

There's really two aspects of it. Um, one aspect of it is really a feature of our equipment. So you've got sensors that are on dock equipment. I haven't really talked about it yet, but we can get inside the plant with that as well and have sensors and intersection control and high speed doors and things like that.

But the other aspect of it was customers coming to us looking for information just centered around their loading dock and just improving the operation of and the efficiency in which they're running their loading dock system. And as we listen to customers we realize that well, you don't even really need to have smart equipment to make some of that data really come to life, right?

So uh Right Height's got a couple of different products. One is called DockView, which is more of a yard management system and it has check in, check out capabilities with drivers. And today as as we sit here recording this in in the midst of the COVID pandemic, right, a lot of that contactless stuff has become more and more important to our customers.

So having a software only package that doesn't even require right height loading dock equipment has become a really important feature to our customers and we're driving a lot of value through loading dock optimization, a loading dock efficiency. There's still some good data and information you can get out of of it without having sensors at every dock position. But the software package itself is incru is making the processes that our customers are using more efficient.

even without going through an elaborate sensor upgrade package throughout your whole facility.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the smart equipment that Wright Height is is making for inside the facility? Absolutely. We started off talking about the loading dock equipment, the dock levelers and the dock locks. Absolutely where Right Height got its start building those two pieces of equipment. However, you look at Right Height in 2020, and we're way, way more than dock levelers and dock locks, right? A whole full lineup of industrial doors.

And there are things today we can do, especially in cold storage facilities. Our OptaView platform has an energy module where we can help customers identify the energy uh trends that they're seeing in their facility around things like dock door openings and cooler freezer door openings. So there's an entire energy module with our Optiview platform that helps customers do that. I know in previous podcasts we've talked about the 80,000 accidents a year between a pedestrian and a forklift.

And how dangerous those can be. You know, we've been able to take the sensor technology that we've developed and put it into products like our safety signal. Which is really an intersection control, intersection monitoring system. And we can bring the traffic in your facility to life.

through dashboards, through alerts, through trending reports that we can provide that really allow you to change behaviors of your people that might be putting them in harm's way but haven't quite caused an accident yet. So, you know, you hear customers talk a lot about safety managers talk about near misses and they're impossible to indicate uh whether they're happening or not. They're impossible to track.

Well, it's impossible to track all of them, but through some of the technology available to us today inside the facility, inside the plant, we can help identify some areas where they might not have known there were near misses. So it's back to that changing the behavior of people. In and around the loading dock and inside the facility to help avoid accidents. And and giving them some insight as to why that why it's important and why it's designed the way it is.

Speaking of things that maybe uh customers and uh facilities are missing right now, but would really love to have and I I think this was one of the stats you talked about earlier, Chad, was um that energy savings, that energy management. And I some of these smart these pieces of smart equipment can kind of give you that information, give the facility manager that kind of information to find out maybe we've got a an issue

that is leading to some uh misuse of energy. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. Um The way that we approach it with the energy management is really through trending alerts, right? So we'll tell you based on the energy that you're using Depending on where you have sensors, but it could be your cooler freezer doors, could be at your open dock doors, things like that.

We can tell you whether your your energy consumption on those products is trending up or down over a certain given uh given period of time. I'm gonna pivot to a kind of a broader question now and I'd like to to kind of get your take on what the the overarching approach that Wright Height takes to developing and implementing this kind of smart equipment into a facility. Sure.

It it's really been through the same process, right, I'd use to going forty back forty years to the dock lock, talking to customers, understanding what's important to them, putting that into context, and then really trying to to design a product around that. It's really easy to put sensors on equipment today. It the key is finding sensors that and and information and data that's gonna be meaningful to the customer.

You know, fifty seven percent of people say that they wanna use smart equipment and smart devices to save money. So where can we find ways that'll help you save money and and understand your spend so that we can help you change those behaviors and get that under control? Seventy two percent of people say they want to feel safer.

So how can we develop sensors and data and alerts and information that really help not only your people feel safer, but uh safety professionals in the industry, how can we help you understand the behavior that your people are doing now and how can we help you undergo the change to get people to do the things that you want them to do to ultimately in in improve safety in your facility.

And the last thing that people say they want to do is save time. If if we can do those three things, saving you money, saving you time, making you feel safer. Um through the various software and sensors that we can bring to to the industry. We feel like we've done our job and that we've made your organization a better organization in the process.

Yeah. Is there anything that you feel like uh we didn't talk about uh related to smart equipment that you really wanna touch on here before we sign off? I don't know that there's anything that we necessarily forgot to talk about, but I think the last thing I'll leave the listeners with is Right Height's commitment to the digital platform. Whether you're calling it software, whether you're calling it IIT.

we believe that it is going to be expected of customers in the future. Part of the reason that we've developed our own in-house teams that do everything for us from center development to software design. And it really will be a part of every single piece of equipment that Right Hyde produces moving forward is how can we bring actionable data to our customers So that they can save time, they can save money, and they can make their people feel safer. Perfect.

Well Chad, uh we thank you so much for spending time with us on Right from the Source and uh we encourage Everyone to follow Right Height on all social media platforms and to visit Right Height dot com for additional information or to connect with a team member. Thanks, Chad. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of Write from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and follow Right Height Source.

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