Casual staff adapt quickly to Toyota forklifts

Australia's largest single supplier of irrigation, garden and turf care products, Toro Australia, has selected Toyota Material Handling (TMH) to provide its counterbalance forklift and reach truck requirements.

The specific nature of Toro's business makes driver acceptability and equipment durability of the forklifts vital.

According to the company's national distribution manager, Hank Dirksen, it's important to have material handling equipment to which casual staff can adapt quickly.

The company has a core workforce which works the whole year round, but in the summer months, it is almost doubled with casual staff to deal with the seasonal nature of the business.

"Because of Toyota's place in the market, we find that a lot of the casuals are familiar with Toyota equipment from other jobs where they have worked.

"After our comprehensive review process, the verdict was that Toyota Material Handling provided the best options - including for reach trucks which we hadn't used before."

The new forklift fleet consists of two 6FBRE16 reach trucks, 10 LPG powered 2.5 litre 8-Series forklifts and seven battery electric 1.8 tonne three-wheel forklifts.

Aside from its role servicing and maintaining the equipment under five-year operating lease arrangements, TMH is working closely with Toro to monitor forklift usage and to suggest periodic role changes to even out machine usage.

Toyota provides equipment to simplify battery charging and swaps for the company's battery electric forklifts which are now working up to 16 hours a day.

While the battery electric forklifts are Toro's workhorse units inside its warehouses, the company also selected the advanced technology option for its Toyota 8 Series 2.5 tonne capacity internal combustion forklifts to ensure low exhaust gas emissions.

This provided the company with a 15% reduction in fuel consumption over the previous 7 Series Toyota internal combustion forklifts' performance.