GREENE — After a year filled with celebrating the company’s 100th anniversary, The Raymond Corporation is looking ahead to a year of innovation and helping its customers. The company kicked off 2022 with the introduction of several new products and innovations including its iWAREHOUSE Field Sense proximity-notification system, High Capacity Orderpicker that picks a full […]
GREENE — After a year filled with celebrating the company’s 100th anniversary, The Raymond Corporation is looking ahead to a year of innovation and helping its customers.
The company kicked off 2022 with the introduction of several new products and innovations including its iWAREHOUSE Field Sense proximity-notification system, High Capacity Orderpicker that picks a full rack higher than most models, and its next-generation Virtual Reality Simulator scalable teaching tool that helps customers bring new hires up to speed more quickly.
Over the summer, Raymond held a celebration in honor of the company’s 100th year that included a historical exhibition of the firm’s history.
In November, the company’s founder, George Raymond, Sr. was posthumously inducted into the Logistics Hall of Fame for his invention of the first double-faced wooden pallet.
“I think one of the very special things we experienced and heard at the hall of fame induction was that this double-sided pallet has spawned an industry,” Raymond President/CEO Michael Field says. Raymond has continued to lead the way in innovations from early warehouses to today’s “just-in-time” warehouses.
The company’s role, he says, is to help customers understand, and overcome, challenges using data and real process solutions. While many businesses struggled through the pandemic, Raymond’s products were more in demand than ever, Field notes. E-commerce increased as much as 30 percent during the pandemic as people stayed home and ordered goods online.
“It really changed the way that people expected to receive goods,” he says. “That really has continued to grow our business to the point where we have a lot of backlog.”
Raymond has to step up its game to help its customers move goods quickly and efficiently, he contends.
In 2023 and beyond, Raymond continues to look for opportunities in automation and innovation. From forklifts with microprocessors enabling a customer to track its entire fleet of forklifts to its Raymond lean-management system, it’s all about helping customers optimize and, where appropriate, automate.
“Maybe that travel path for a particular forklift is not value added,” Field says. That may be an opportunity for automation with a self-driving forklift.
New for the company for the coming year is a new set of automated products that help people lift heavier items to higher heights, Field adds.
It all goes back to Raymond’s three main tenets — innovation, quality, and service — and that double-sided pallet developed in the 1930s by George Raymond, Sr. and his colleague William House. Soon after the patent was awarded, Raymond donated it back to the industry.
Today, Raymond employs more than 2,000 people at its Greene headquarters and its locations in Syracuse and Iowa and is currently hiring. Raymond also employs more than 7,000 people at its solution and support centers around the world.