Holman Logistics Uses Artificial Intelligence to Increase Forklift Safety

The Challenge

For Holman Logistics, nothing is more important than the safety of its team members and the customers for whom they provide manufacturing logistics, warehousing, and transportation services.

“Our core values set the foundation for the work we do, and we have no more important core value than safety. We constantly seek technology, training, and other innovative resources to help us maintain our superior safety performance,” commented Brien Downie, president of Holman Logistics.

Holman operates forklifts in all its locations across the United States, and operations managers and customers understand the human and financial costs of forklift-related accidents. Holman currently monitors and tracks forklift activity; however, management wanted to understand the root causes of mishaps and find out if it was possible to create a system to warn of problems and prevent accidents from occurring.

The Solution

Along with ensuring that it hires, trains, and develops technically proficient forklift drivers, Holman chose to partner with OneTrack to leverage that company’s expertise in Computer Vision and Deep Learning, also known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Computer Vision refers to software processing images from an onboard camera. While the concept of Computer Vision has been around for a long time, recent advancements in Deep Learning allow computers to detect, recognize, and predict high-level concepts from images with superhuman accuracy and reliability.

A system powered by Deep Learning has the ability not only to detect that an incident occurred, but also to learn why that incident occurred. Most importantly, it can recognize the same pattern in the future and provide a real-time warning when it thinks a similar incident is about to happen. Such a system continues to learn while deployed, actively preventing incidents and continuously getting better at doing so. As the system learns, drivers become safer and more effective, and the number of accidents can be reduced over time.

These technologies create a safer, more efficient workplace for everyone, which is important for Holman because processes, requirements, and workflows can vary greatly by customer and location across its network of facilities.

Brien Downie concluded, “I am confident that these AI tools, along with our never-ending safety focus, will help us achieve our goal of accident-free operations. AI technology is already having a positive impact on the safety performance of the entire industry.”

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