Before the implementation of GemOne’s fleet management solution, Atlas Toyota Material Handling — a leading forklift dealership in the American Midwest — grappled with several challenges that resulted in operational inefficiencies in their business.

What follows is a summary of the challenges faced by Atlas; how GemOne telematics helped Atlas overcome them; and the results Atlas achieved in their dealership business by implementing the Sapphire fleet and safety management solution. You can download the full comprehensive case study here.  

“Telematics is here to stay,” says Giovanni G., Fleet Account Manager for Atlas. “It’s not going away.”

Challenges for Dealerships

Challenge 1: Collating data

Collating data was labour-intensive and took huge amounts of time. The amount of valuable data that could be collected was limited. It was inefficient and frustrating. “We had to rely on work order history,” says Giovanni. “I’d physically have to go there and extract that data to pull out the necessary information.”

Challenge 2: Safety compliance

Another challenge was safety compliance. “Many customers were still using the old pencil and paper safety checklist system,” says Giovanni. “They filed it away in a manilla folder and then hoped they didn’t have to give it to an OSHA officer at some point in time.” Those manilla folders were frequently lost. The writing was often illegible. Time and time again, the safety checklists were not correctly filled out.

Challenge 3: Tracking hours

Yet another challenge was the tracking of key hours of machine usage. “We still had technicians making house calls and walking to every single machine,” says Giovanni. “That’s 3 to 4 hours of the technicians’ time, walking across the site, driving to the site, and driving back. Most of the time, we’re not even billing for that collection of key hour data. In a time of labour shortage and rising fuel costs, technicians’ wasted hours and machine downtime were hurting business overheads.

GemOne Sapphire: A Comprehensive Telematics Solution

GemOne helped Atlas overcome these challenges with Sapphire, a telematics solution tailored to the unique needs of the material handling industry and designed to help businesses manage their forklift fleets more effectively. "The biggest benefit of GemOne is the data that it provides. It's very user-friendly, easy to read, and easily exported into an Excel spreadsheet to make a table for a customer," says Giovanni.

Onboarding and installation at Atlas was quick and easy. Sapphire hardware is robust: IP67-certified, dust and water-resistant, and built to meet industrial demands. GemOne provided technical training for dealership sales and installation staff as well as comprehensive post sales account management support.

After adoption, Giovanni could see all the data from Atlas customer warehouses in an online cloud platform which meant Atlas could offer actionable business insights to their customers. “They can see what their utilisation is,” says Giovanni. “We can dive into the figures for them so they don’t have to. It helps them make a good decision on leasing or buying outright or even extending their lease.”

Business Benefits

1. More Effective Safety Compliance Support

With Sapphire, Atlas now helps its customers more easily manage safety compliance. Sapphire’s on-screen OSHA compliant safety checklists make pre- and post-start checks mandatory, with operator lockout if there’s a critical issue. Not only does the safety checklist deliver insights on the behaviour of operators and the safety status of individual machines, but it tracks these user behaviours and safety issues in real-time and makes the data available through a cloud platform on any device.

2. Safer Warehouses for Atlas Customers

Sapphire’s safety features such as Impact Reporting and Automatic Lock-Out mean Atlas can now better help their customers avoid the cost of human injury, equipment damage, and machine downtime. With Impact Reporting, for example, Giovanni and Atlas customers are now able to record and analyse impacts on individual machines. The data provided about the level of those impacts in g-force can be combined with operator data and location insights to ascertain which areas in their warehouses are less safe and to establish which operators might require more targeted safety training.

3. Streamlined Operator Management Services

With Access Control functionality, Atlas now helps its customers put an end to the unapproved use of forklifts. In addition, Atlas uses Sapphire’s Session Reporting feature to end confusion amongst its customers about operator activity, monitoring the activity of operators on a daily basis to gain insights on efficiencies. With Operator Licence and OSHA Training expiration tracking, Atlas customers can now ensure that their machine operators always comply with the appropriate OSHA training and licensing requirements.

4. Optimised Fleet Efficiency

With Hours Reporting, Atlas customers no longer have to guess which machines in their fleet are working the most. “Right now I’m currently about to dive into an account that I’ve got to do a pretty large report for,” says Giovanni. “I’ll pull hours data out of their GemOne site. It’s a national account so I can pull their 11 locations together and then extract the data. Simple.”

5. Improved Maintenance and Downtime Management

With Sapphire’s Hours Reporting feature, Giovanni sees real-time insights on the hours operated on each of Atlas customers’ machines to set service intervals proactively. In this way, Giovanni helps his customers save on maintenance costs, reduce machine downtime, and optimise their operations. Better oversight on maintenance scheduling prolongs the lifespan of equipment and reduces costly repairs.

Continuing Partnership

Giovanni can’t envisage going back to a time before he worked with GemOne telematics.

“Without GemOne’s Sapphire, I feel like we would go back probably 50 years, and be a lot less productive,” says Giovanni. “Our billings would take a hit. We’d have wasted time all over the place. Telematics is here to stay.”

Atlas Toyota Material Handling is committed to continuing its partnership with GemOne and utilising the Sapphire solution in the future. “We’re promoting GemOne to our customers each and every opportunity that we have,” says Giovanni. “I see GemOne as our go-to for telematics.”

You can download the full free Atlas case study today to discover all the ways in which GemOne telematics can improve fleet and safety management offerings for equipment dealerships in material handling and help them level up their customer service offering.