The Iowa-based customer, in its continuous efforts to improve quality and gain efficiencies, sought to reduce travel time and costs associated with the delivery of parts to its manufacturing and assembly locations. The company’s internal suppliers were responsible for delivering parts to the assembly line in various frequencies throughout the day. The improvement goal was to reduce unnecessary travel and implement labor savings with its suppliers. The first step was to standardize on quad-steer carts for all materials movement, enabling the company to hook carts from different suppliers together. The second step was to automate the driving piece.

“With the customer’s objective in mind, Wisconsin Lift Truck brought in the Seegrid GT3 robotic tugger for a demo,” said Mike Casey, vice president, Fleet Services, Wisconsin Lift Truck Corp. “We were able to implement the GT3 at the customer site in a day without having to significantly modify the company’s facility or processes, and the robotic tugger has been providing consistent results every day, including impressive labor savings.”

The Seegrid GT3 robot has the payload capacity required to pull more than five in-house tracking supply carts at the manufacturing facility. This parts-delivery process occurs over multiple shifts, 10 times or more each shift. The train of carts contains nearly all the parts needed for the company’s products.

“The Wisconsin Lift Truck customer implementation is another great example where Seegrid’s industrial mobile robots provide operating cost savings from day one of installation and every day thereafter,” said Scott Friedman, Seegrid CEO. “Different than AGVs on the market today, our robots use NO lasers, tape or wires for guidance and instead use cameras and intelligent software to navigate their environment, providing a much simpler, more affordable solution.”

About Seegrid Corporation
Seegrid (http://www.seegrid.com) brings a new class of affordable industrial mobile robots (IMR) to the material handling industry that operate reliably and safely in dynamic warehouse, distribution and manufacturing environments. Seegrid’s robots differ from today’s AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) in that the company’s IMR technology is the first to provide early-stage capabilities of autonomous robot behavior with Sense, Move, Analyze, Interact and Repeat capabilities. The result—AGV-like competence but with greater flexibility at a considerably lower cost. IMR-enabled robots provide WalkThroughThenWork™ capabilities, providing an operator with the ability to simply and easily instruct the robot along a desired path, adding behaviors such as horns and stop stations, usually in minutes. Seegrid robots literally come straight off the truck; an operator quickly inputs the path and the robots are immediately productive.

About Wisconsin Lift Truck Corp.
Wisconsin Lift Truck Corp., one of Wisconsin’s largest privately held firms, is a 46-year-old full service material handling company with more than 300 employees at its headquarters in Brookfield, its branches in Germantown, Green Bay, Janesville and Wausau and its business partners. Those partners include Wolter Power Systems, which specializes in new industrial engines and generator sales, service and parts; and Contractor Equipment Services, which offers construction and aerial equipment, sweepers and scrubbers including new and used sales, rental service and parts.

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Lisa McCausland
Geneva Street Marketing
P:  303-888-2137
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