NewCastle Systems – Mobile Powered Workstations

NewCastle Systems product is not inexpensive.

Customers initially ask, well, why is this so much money? Well, there’s some technology involved. The reality is the average powered cart runs between $3,000 to $5,000 each. So when they think of cart the nomenclature, that’s like maybe a $300 cart, right? So $3,000 to $5,000 sounds high. The average price for a powered cart is around $4000. Companies that have many people using mobile computer workstations, that’s the opportunity. We have companies that have 50, 60, 100 mobile computer workstations in a building and then they have multiple buildings like a UPS, a big customer of Newcastle, and they have spent many, many, many millions of dollars. The best part of this product that I love since I’ve been in sales for 35 years, is the ROI is almost always less than six months when we measure the ROI. And that’s just because of the simple math we’ll get to soon. 

NewCastle Systems manufacturing is based in the Boston Mass. area. 

Most of our product is manufactured from, local steel shelving. There are some components that do come from overseas. You cannot source them in this country. Lithium specifically, you can’t mine it, can’t get it. We’ve had supply chain challenges like a lot of people, but I’m proud to say our lead time is really right now only about two weeks. So if you place an order for under ten units, we’ll say it goes out quick. 

We sell heavily into the warehouse space. We can support your efforts with pilots, pilot tests, motion studies, demos, etc.. And we’re highly focused. I mean, we don’t have a lot of products. We have a few flavors of one product, basically, and they all sort of do the same thing. So we’re good at it. We have a lot of data and a lot of information to help you If you’ve been to Mode X or Pro Matt, you’ve obviously seen or read enough about robotics and how fast it’s growing and warehousing, and that is mainly because labor is scarce and getting scarcer. And so in this application you see on the left, those are collaborative robots made by Locus Robotics Company based in Massachusetts. They’ve grown like 4,000% in a short period of time and all they do is eliminate footsteps. 

With NewCastle Systems the picker, instead of him carrying a box to a packing station or putting it on a pallet and dragging it, the robot will come to him. 

He will place the box on the robot. The robot goes back to the pack table, thus eliminating travel. When you take away travel, you do a lot more value added work or you keep on time on task. And Newcastle mobile powered workstations does the same thing, the picture on the right warehouse guy in an orange vest, printing labels, looking up data and he’s doing it at the source of activity or the place where work has to take place. He’s not walking back and forth. And so because of that, you eliminate footsteps and then you get what ultimately people are buying, and that is productivity. 

You get somebody if somebody commute there, that’d be great. 2 to 3 X productivity is not uncommon and that’s really what people are buying. 

But really the mobile powered workstations are extremely rugged for material handling. You know that that’s important in a warehouse. The battery systems are great. But really what they’re buying from us, it’s it’s the impact on their business. It’s the only reason they keep buying and buying a lot of them, especially when COVID got things really busy, we had customers spending five times more than they ever spent because they needed to get more efficient. So what they’re buying is mainly productivity. They’re buying accuracy. Accuracy is a big problem in warehousing and manufacturing, with labeling people applying the wrong label to the wrong box. It is so common you’d be surprised and there’s a huge cost to that. We help with fatigue. People aren’t walking around as much. We hope with safety. People aren’t walking in front of fork trucks to get a label. We help with the flow of a business. When you look at a dock you see pallets lined up and the docks are congested, they have bad flow. You’re not turning your inventory fast enough. And there’s a high cost to that. The cost of customer service and the cost of carrying cost of inventory stuff’s just sitting there. So these are the reasons people come to us and we wrap it all up with a great ROI and I’ll show you a tool that we use to make that real simple for people. 

Think about the outputs of the product here more so than the product benefits or features and the verticals and the applications with NewCastle Systems. 

Receiving is the number one use of our product. Everybody has to receive product, they have to label it. They use they have to do some data entry. They usually have some software, warehouse management, software or ERP, and they can either walk back and forth to a desk or an office or they can get mobile number one use of our product shipping, same thing, bigger car, maybe more devices on the cart. And what they’re really interested in is marrying paperwork. So if you’re printing out bills of lading and packing slips as well as labels, a lot of companies aren’t doing that in the same place. And then they so they go out to the shipping dock and they got to marry that together. And that’s when you get a lot of mistakes. So and you can see some of the metrics and the results and then returns turns is a huge, huge business. Nobody likes to say no to returns e-commerce. They will take they will sell you five things. 

With NewCastle Systems they will take four back and they’ll smile doing it because they don’t want to lose that customer. 

What happens is and I have been into Wal Mart facility. Where there is a sea of things. As far as you can see, that hasn’t been touched in six months. They haven’t even looked at it yet. That’s a huge problem. And then our product can help kind of move that material through the system a lot faster. Inventory a lot of people, especially bigger companies, have dedicated inventory clerks who are doing nothing more than cycle counting, just counting things all day, keeping their inventory accurate. And they can either use a handheld computer, but they like our system because it’s bigger and they’ve got a full screen or a full keyboard.

NewCastle Systems – it’s just a better tool. 

Picking is a big part of of warehousing. It’s 50% of the labor costs, to be honest. So anything that helps with picking, we don’t really have a picking cart per se anymore because people have so many flavors they want. They use their own picking mobile computer workstations and we just apply power so that they can put their screen and their printer on the picking car. But when people start to batch pick as opposed to pick each one at a time, they get way more efficient. And that’s a big, big use case to your existing customers. They have a lot of people picking in most companies then less, but at least pack stations, packed stations, people just dropping packages to a shipping dock. And then somebody has to go out there and they just sort of wrap it all up in one giant car. It’s a pretty cool application. And then supervisory use, we have a lot of supervisors becoming mobile and so and this is like at a factory setting. 

DHL, a huge company, spent millions of dollars trading their front line supervisors because what they’ve learned is when they engage their employees and I’m talking the pickers, the receivers and the shipping clerks, they got 30 to 40% productivity gains simply by engaging people. 

That’s a real standard sort of metric that big companies are understanding. Finally, if you actually know your people, you can manage them and actually get them to help you reach your goals. So mobile supervisor mobile powered workstations are on the rise for us, some of our customers now you’ll see a lot of big customers. And I realize that maybe these enterprise guys aren’t maybe in your wheelhouse, maybe they are. But we have thousands and thousands of users that don’t make the screen. It just that it resonates with people. 

The four markets that we really focus on is retail, manufacturing and anybody who supplies manufacturer, third party logistics and wholesale distribution. 

So anybody who distributes a a plumbing part, food, food related items, you name it, they’re all good targets because they all label products. And so the buyers like who are you going to call today, even though you think this if you think these are the greatest thing since sliced bread, who’s your first call to? Usually people come to us or the warehouse management side of things, but also in manufacturing, could be operations managers, could be QA or QC, people could be I.T, people could be facilities or maintenance and the lean industrial engineers. We really like those people because they’re really good at measuring things and we want people to measure. But I think there’s a DNA no matter who calls us, and that is the DNA and the willingness to improve. 

If you’re not willing to improve, you know, your customers. 

Those are the guys that bought something from you ten years ago and could care less about all the new things. You’ve been talking to them since. They just I’m not going to buy anything until they absolutely have to. Well, our customers, they’re buying way ahead of the curve. They’re early adopters. And they want to they want to buy technology that’s going to help them today because they need it. And so the problem, again, we’ll send these slides to you the best way, and this resonates with people like trade shows. 

People don’t look at walking. 

Nobody notices walking in a warehouse until they measure it. So we try to draw these lines on the ground. It’s called a spaghetti diagram to kind of show what it looks like when some worker is walking thousands of steps a day to print a label, to get a piece of paper, to do data entry. And that’s the before story. And then the after people stay out in their work place, their time on task is a lot higher. And because of that, there’s less walking and their metrics are a lot better. So your customers that you want to look at are people who are struggling, getting material received and shipped accurately. So poor flow. Typically, it’s easy for you guys to notice because the docks are jammed with material and often it’s been sitting there for more than a day. 

It’s just some real stories. 

We’ve got many, many stories. It isn’t it isn’t that you always have to have a large building. This is Samsung and they are manufacturers of flat screen TVs. And you can see that fixed station right there, very common in a warehouse. People are dragging that pallet to the fixed station and. It’s only a thousand square feet. It’s not a big space. It’s small. All of you have customers that have 1000 square feet, trust me. But just because they could now go to the the actual pallet, they’re saving to two and one half hours a day. That’s a 30% increase in productivity. So if you go to a big company like Samsung, you would think that they are really efficient. And we’ve learned that, again, because no one looks at walking very closely. It’s just an unseen problem that exists. So I don’t think that you need to have a huge building to to get improvement. Bigger business here produce distribution, 40 dock doors. They were walking into that office 50, 60, 70 times a day. You’re talking ten people. 

It’s just the amount of time wasted. 

It was ridiculous. But more so. What’s more importantly, these people were cheating and starting to print multiple orders. And so they started putting peach labels on strawberries, strawberry labels on potatoes. It was a mess. People getting the wrong things. Also the organic produce. The organic versus the organic. All of this stuff equated to about half a million dollars a year of cost to this company. And all they did, again, is they got mobile. Now, the technology you see on here, the printing, the scanning software, etc., if you’re not involved in it, it’s okay. We have many partners to work with you on that and they’ll do all that technology stuff. You guys keep the card business. They’re more than happy to. Why? Because it’s a lead for them. They’re more than willing to help you. Trust me. And we have a lot of good, trusted partners in our network that will say, Hey, here’s a person in your neck of the woods, work with them, they’ll do the technology, you guys do the battery powered cart, and the customer gets ultimately what they need, which is a half million dollars in savings. 

And I guess if these are the sort of images I want to sort of have you think about as you walk through your customers, a lot of them have legacy printers and some of them are stuck in a room and some of them are stuck on a table. 

But some of these printers are like ten years old, 15 years old, and they just look at it as a commodity. So they don’t look at the process. And they’re not they’re not attuned to the cost of all that motion and all those errors and all that process waste. And that’s what we’re good at here, is highlighting that through marketing and our sales team. Our sales team focuses on this because you can’t really go to your customers and say to them, Would you like to buy some mobile powered carts? They won’t even know what that means. Trust me, we have tried that many years ago and it just doesn’t work for us. 

You got to focus on the process and so we have a cool tool if you want to use this. 

It’s it’s downloadable to an iPhone or an Android device and it allows you to do your own work study or let your customer do work study. And what I want to show you is the math we sell and close business a lot of times on math. Right. And the math is if you can capture how much time is wasted per hour in minutes, how much walking is wasted, populate it into our calculator and you can even add some of your technology if you guys have barcode printing and scanning in there as well as a cart. The the complete system is about 4000 bucks. Six people using it say it’s 24,000, but they’re going to save 43,000 a year. 

So the ROI here, 6.7 months and it’s only costing them 800 bucks a year for five years. 

So the savings is important to companies right now. But what may be more important is the hours saved because they can’t get labor right now. It’s really hard. It’s been hard for ten years. It’s not getting easier. It’s working in a warehouse is not glamorous. And so 18 bucks an hour on average, it’s not attractive. So anything you can do to pick up hours in a warehouse or factory, which is what we do, is appreciate it. So this tool is available to you for free. I encourage you to use it and figure it out how it can. You can work it into your selling process. 

So what are they? Power, right? It isn’t it isn’t complicated. It’s laptops. It’s barcode printers. It’s scanners, it’s scales. 

It’s kind of redundant, to be honest. There’s not a lot of inch screens. Once in a while you get an odd thing. Just check with us. Most we can power just about anything up to about 2000 watts, which is a pretty hefty thing. Laser printers, just so you know, if your customer has a laser printer, maybe a HP or a Lexmark, those are power hogs. And we need to know that so we can design the cart. It’s not a problem. It just requires are really big, powerful inverter. But most of these people are using very common, what I call it, related devices and all we’re and we’re just making it mobile. A couple of battery technologies I’ll talk about, that’s really kind of what you want to think about is there are three for the most part sealed. That acid is very common. Think about your car, your boat, pretty old school. Been around for a long time. 

They work. It work just fine. 

One of the things the caveats, though, they they don’t last as long as lithium. They might last 1 to 3 years. And you do have to plug them in. If you do not plug them in, you will destroy that battery pretty quickly. A lot of our customers are willing to pay twice as much for lithium because they don’t have to worry about that as much. So see all that acid old school but works just fine. Fixed lithium is a lithium brick, we call it. You still have to plug it into a wall, but it lasts 8 to 10 years. It’s a great investment and it’s a third of the weight. So it’s very light, very durable, and they’ll have these mobile powered workstations for many years before they need to replace battery and then getting into more. I guess these are really where the growth products are for us. These green batteries are lithium ion, phosphate, swappable or what we call the mini. These are designed for maybe multi shift, multi shift application. So the dual dock you see on the right, it’s hot swappable. 

So if somebody is running 24 seven, all they need is a fresh battery and they’re good to go. 

They take out the battery that’s getting a little warm to put the actually put the fresh one in first replace, take out the old battery, put it in the charger and they just keep going.So these batteries are really the future of our company. We’ve seen more and more people be willing to spend more money because they want that flexibility.  

The Nucleus Mini is a smaller version.

It’s price points pretty low. So that attracts a lot of companies. Well, it’s not hot swappable. So if you pull that battery out, you will lose power. But that battery weighs like £6. Maybe it weighs nothing. So that’s sort of the to the chemistry steel let acid fix lithium and sort of swappable lithium. And it will work with your work with sales reps on specific projects and that’s still value into exact part numbers and which is what we’ll get to here. The mobile powered carts themselves sort of small, medium, large and extra large. That’s the way I like to describe them. The light is very small, might be good. And if you look at the pictures, you can see the devices, small label, printer scan or a laptop. You know, you can sell something like that for under 2000. You get into the IC series, it’s it’s all welded, it’s beefier. It can handle a bigger printer. It can support a screen that you see there. And that might be more like 3000. 

Get into the envy.

 That’s that’s our most common most popular model. It’s 24 inches wide, meets a lot of needs for people. You can configure that with lead acid, fix lithium, a single bay lithium or dual bay lithium. So it’s very flexible and those are probably in the three to 3 to 5000 range. And then the PC series is really big, good for shipping. We have a model that’s 48 inches long and then you can actually add like an 18 inch extension onto that. So you have a really big cart. That’s great if you’ve got a lot of devices in shipping mainly and as you see, it supports £400. It’s a beast. But in those range, say from, I don’t know, close to close to four to almost 6000. And again, the best way, do not try this yourself. The best thing is work with the rep. That’s what they’re paid for. Work on the project. They’ll do a call with you if you need a visit. If it’s reasonable, they’ll do that. They can do a teams meeting if they need a demo. We can work on that as well. And then that’s it. I don’t like to talk. I can do many more slides, but really I want you to understand the applications so the industries, the people who buy these and why they buy them more than anything. And then as far as the flavors go, you’ll learn those by just by doing over time.

What’s the 32nd explanation to the client to get them to listen to the story? 

Yeah, well, what I’d say is if it is a warehouse person, I’d start with labor. They have a hard time getting people. Yeah, well, I mean, we’ve got a tool here. Just picked it up that saves a lot of time and money. You know, you want to hear more. And then if they’re inquisitive, yes, they will talk more. And then it’s a matter of just labeling. Labeling is so common that they all know what that means. But what they don’t know is that it’s costing them money. They just don’t know that because, again, they’re not standing out there with a stopwatch. So you’ve got to sort of pique their interest about labor productivity efficiency. And for us, it’s just eliminating footsteps. That’s all we’re trying to do for these guys. And then we have a lot of good use cases, case studies, math behind it to support it. And if it’s if it’s a good size deal, we’ll be happy to put a demo in there and they can validate the math themselves. We’re we’re confident we’re going to. We want them to do that because then they can’t. 

What we’ve learned is that they won’t argue with themselves. 

Right. If they show 15 minutes wasted an hour. That’s your math, not mine. So when somebody goes to pick something, they take your cart and they’re they’re taking two mobile powered workstations, one to put the product on and one to have the labels which you have. Is that correct, as I’m envisioning this process? No, it’d be one cart. It would be one cart that usually is moving to something that’s not moving. So usually it’s a pallet of things on a on a pallet or a bunch of boxes on the floor that they have to label. So those things don’t move. The cart moves. Okay. So. So you’re doing it for. For putting things away and for packing and shipping. Packing and shipping. Receiving and counting, mainly. Yep. In picking if they’re picking a bunch of items. So they would take your cart down and label things as they go? They could, yeah. 

A lot of people do that. Sure.

 It depends. It’s a great way to just go up and down the aisles and label things. But they’re actually picking them onto a cart. Then they would need like a four tiered cart, which I imagine I don’t know if you guys have sources for that, but that’s they’re very easy to find. They might be picking to a cart. They might be picking and putting it on a robot. I mean, basically you’re just having your station there. So their labeling as it goes as opposed to running back and forth. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, exactly.

The NewCastle Systems case studies are very oriented towards problems that clients are having and how to solve it. 

This this is literally a battery, but we have to get it right for the customer because we don’t want to we don’t want to disappoint them. And if you under power a car, the customer won’t be happy. So we’ve got to get that right. So they’re here to help you guys. Don’t try this yourself. Just let us walk you through the first couple. And if you want to go solo, then that’s up to you guys. But we’re always here to help. 

Are there warranties on the batteries, in the battery powered cart? 

Yeah. Most of our product would be a especially the most popular being the nucleus, power swap nucleus, the classic battery. The bigger one, it’s typically five years, five year battery system. All the mobile powered carts are five years. And just some of the smaller like I think the mini being, it’s a lower end product that would be about three years. But we can also send you we’ve got it broken up for our warranty. So just think of it typically five years or for these units here that are our most popular units. On any of the batteries are there. You know, the batteries used to be with memories where they would start to shorten out if you started to partially charge them. Is there any impact to the any of the batteries as far as longevity by recharging at half or three quarters versus or letting them sit on the Chargers? Well, best practice is full charge, full discharge. But a lot of our customers don’t do that. They can’t do that. They might only use a third of the battery in a day. You cannot overcharge these things. We have a trickle built into it and a battery management system. So when it tops off, it just sort of hangs around. So there’s no there’s no risk. What you can do is neglect them and not charge them for days and weeks. And then you will you will ruin the battery.

Yeah. You can’t let them sit flat for. 

Well we ship these we I think we can get about maybe about six months and a half charge state, but that’s not what we’re telling customers. We don’t want them thinking that way. Right. So, yeah, that’s that’s the customers who have a lot of these. It’s part of their it’s like a fork truck. They use these every day. They’re very good at taking care of them. Okay. Yeah. It’s personal experience with batteries. 

Lead acid are probably the least forgiving if you don’t charge them up after you use them. Yeah. So I guess if I can ask the question, do you guys, as you think about this product, I guess anybody if they want to open up because I don’t know you’re I don’t know you all at all yet, but maybe where do you how does it position into what you do on your day to day, sort of, you know, outreach to your customers? How does it fit? 

Have NewCastle Systems done much with hospitals? 

I’m trying to think where the application would lie in a hospital environment. Not so much in the patient rooms, but we are in a lot of times these hospitals have receiving docs in warehouses. Yeah. So we’ve put quite a few into hospitals, but it’s not in the patient room. And that’s because there are a lot of rules and guidelines about staff. So a lot of players in that area, a lot of. Ours is more it’s you know, we did market development to focus on industrial environments. That’s right. Now I would see it as a material management supply chain application, not for the patients. But. Supply chain. I’m just trying to get there labeling and going. I’m going to I’m working on an on a material space right now. They’re redoing their whole space. I’m going to see what kind of printings they actually do. Yeah, I don’t know if things come in pre printed or what have you. Medical distribution. I mean, we have a lot of companies that are doing like a Cardinal Health. That is all the supplies for hospitals. 

I mean, there they’re good customer of NewCastle Systems. 

Yeah. And bringing up Lamy, you brought up a good point. Very few customers, companies can take the label that’s given to them. It’s just that their numbering scheme doesn’t match your numbering scheme. You need your numbering scheme on these things, so you have to label stuff. So I’d be surprised at the hospital is just going to take a McKesson box of whatever sanitary wipes or something. They probably don’t have to do something. Yeah, yeah. I just don’t know if they’re doing it. They’re, I just not sure if it just sits at their stage. You know, they’re all their pallets usually come into one staging spot and they would have some get around it. But so it’s it’s an interesting concept. We could I’ll talk to some of the material managers, see what they think.

You might sell a cart to somebody once and they don’t buy more and that doesn’t help anyone. 

 The last ten years running, we’ve grown 20 to 25% a year, actually doubled sales during the last two years. 

And, you know, not to be boasting, but we’re proud of our success. We just purchased a new factory that’s twice the size of the one we’re in now.  I’m talking to the barcoding folks there in the warehouse, the material handling folks. It seems like, you know, there’s a lot of talk about inflation and obviously. But but these warehouse folks, including our customers, they’re still buying. And they’re going to keep buying. So as long as we have good solutions to offer them, then I think business will just you know, we’ll just keep moving along here. Raw stores, big retailer. Tesla, Harbor Freight, Boeing. mobile computer workstations.