Customer Case Study
Customer: Yandle-Witherspoon, Inc.
Location: Charlotte, North Carolina
Channel: Distribution / Reseller
Industry: HVAC Products
Application: Material Handling Forklift Fleet Management Consolidation
Introduction
Some of the best business success stories we’ve ever heard start with the phrase, “I know a guy”, which is how this case study begins.
Charlotte, North Carolina’s Yandle-Witherspoon Supply, Inc is a premier HVAC product distributor serving contractors and facility managers throughout the Carolinas. With fourteen branch offices in two states and sixty-five years in business, Yandle-Witherspoon knows a thing or two about industrial wholesale distribution, one of which being when to call out internal operational challenges that limit the business’ performance.
In late 2019, Yandle-Witherspoon found themselves facing declining productivity and growing management costs across their forklift fleet that needed quick attention. An employee mentioned their struggles to a key supplier in passing, and the supplier in turn recommended Atlantic Forklift Services as a potential resource that could solve these forklift fleet management issues. Quickly after getting this referral, we reached out to Yandle-Witherspoon to learn more and to see if we could be “the guy” they were in search of.
About Us
Atlantic Forklift Services serves warehousing, manufacturing, and distribution organizations across the Carolinas with professional equipment sales, rentals, service, repair, parts, training, and solution consulting. As a Platinum award-winning dealership, Atlantic partners with world-class equipment manufacturers including Bobcat (formerly Doosan). Our primary mission is to provide noticeably superior customer service and greater flexibility rooted in honest relationships and commitment to our customers’ success.
Application Summary
Out of the main building trades involved in constructing and maintaining commercial facilities such as hospitals, manufacturing plants, and office buildings, HVAC is arguably one of the most complex and nuanced out there. Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) buyers deal with such a wide variety of materials, components, and equipment that a single job might involve hundreds of different manufacturers from across the globe. To bridge the gap between the buyers of such goods (usually contractors and facility managers) and the countless manufacturers producing these goods, businesses known as Wholesale Distributors take on the critical role of intermediate, localized supplier.
Wholesalers purchase bulk products from manufacturers, warehouse and distribute these goods across their markets, and resell smaller volumes to individual buyers as they’re needed. In this way, HVAC distributors serve buyers with competitive material stock, per-project sourcing, personal relationships, and local delivery, while allowing manufacturers to focus on mass volume production.
Challenge
After a quick discovery call, our team made the short trip over to Yandle-Witherspoon’s Charlotte office to meet with their operations team and gather information on the challenges at hand. During this meeting, Yandle-Witherspoon’s team laid out their concerns straight away.
Across the company’s fourteen branch locations, they were experiencing escalating cost trends and increasingly complicated administrative efforts just to keep their forklift fleet in operation. To account for these issues, Yandle-Witherspoon’s leaders performed a gap analysis on their forklift fleet, arriving at the following discrete pain points:
- Multiple different vendors were contracted to different branch offices, creating lots of redundant, at times conflicting work to manage the company’s forklift fleet
- There were too many brands and styles of forklifts throughout the organization that complicated operator scheduling, maintenance, and training
- Multiple dissimilar lease and purchase agreements were in place that required lots of administrative time to manage
- Spare parts inventory levels were excessive and highly redundant, driving up carrying costs
- No technical standardization existed between branches for forklift capacities or functionality, requiring more effort to coordinate and confirm company logistics
- Billing and cost tracking were different between vendors, causing errors and confusion
- The multiple vendors would frequently solicit different branches, creating internal managerial turmoil and distraction
At the end of our initial meeting with Yandle-Witherspoon’s team, the goal was clear. The company had ended up with many fractured pieces that needed to be put back together into a singular whole, and that was our assigned homework.
Quote
“One day out in the shop, we were chatting with one of our equipment suppliers and mentioned offhand the growing challenges we were facing in managing our forklift fleet, and they couldn’t recommend Atlantic Forklift Service fast enough.
From the first meeting, Atlantic demonstrated superb honesty and openness in trying to help us solve our issues, and communicated better than any forklift vendor we’ve ever worked with. After switching to Atlantic, we’ve definitely seen cost and administrative savings, but more important than that is we’ve gained a real partner that we trust.”
Solution
Back at our office, our sales team reviewed Yandle-Witherspoon’s feedback and began to outline our plan. We saw two objectives at hand: first, to recommend new commercial practices that would solve the client’s operational challenges, and second, to propose services that would implement these practices at a net cost reduction. After a quick technical analysis of the client’s material handling requirements and cost targets, we compiled our suggestions as follows:
- Consolidate forklift purchase, leasing, service, and support into a singular Master Service Agreement that governs all branches and lifts in Yandle-Witherspoon’s fleet.
- Assign a single Account Manager contact that would be the responsible party and personal advocate of Yandle-Witherspoon’s contract.
- Set up a rolling conversion plan that would replace lifts as they come off previous leases or hit their end-of-life points with new, standardized models so that unnecessary variations would be eliminated.
- In parallel to standardizing lifts, spare parts inventories would also be standardized to reduce costs, space, and redundancy.
- Produce a global maintenance and service plan for maintaining all forklifts in the fleet, including forecast schedule and cost elements so that there would be no surprises.
- Incorporate predictable pricing and lease timing parameters for all branches up front.
- Harmonize all invoicing and administrative elements into a single workflow, minimizing administrative and accounting efforts for both parties.
- Provide ongoing, proactive training and education to operators and managers alike, making the transition as smooth as possible and rebuilding productivity across all branches.
Upon hearing our suggestions, Yandle-Witherspoon’s leadership team agreed that centralizing their forklift fleet management to a single vendor would offer tremendous benefits. With that, they asked us to draw up a master service agreement right away.
Results
Over the five years since signing our joint agreement, Atlantic Forklift Service and Yandle-Witherspoon, Inc. have achieved all of our collective goals for the partnership, and then some. Today, both companies work together to ensure that the right forklifts are always available at the right time and at the right price, backed up by full maintenance support, 24/7 emergency service, and ongoing training.
We enjoy a fruitful relationship built on trust and integrity, and are privileged enough that Yandle-Witherspoon frequently invites our team to their quarterly meetings to directly provide fleet performance updates, operational insights, and safety tips. From the client’s perspective, we know that there have been substantial savings in terms of lease costs, operator efficiency, service wait times, and administrative workflows.
But beyond the savings, Yandle-Witherspoon has shed the old stress of having to manage an incongruent forklift fleet, knowing that Atlantic Forklift Service is “their guy” covering all their bases.
- 15% reduction in forklift fleet management costs by consolidating to Atlantic Forklift Service
- 25% reduction in administration overhead associated with forklift transactions
- 24/7 emergency response coverage by Atlantic Forklift Service
- 5% higher distribution throughput by standardizing forklift fleet models and training
To learn more about Atlantic Forklift Service and how we can help fulfill your organization’s forklift fleet management needs, please contact us by phone at (866) 243-0991, by email at info@atlanticforkliftservices.com