Yale Lift Truck Technologies announced demonstrations of two technologies designed to help alleviate warehouse labor challenges at the 2025 IWLA Convention and Expo May 4-6 in Tucson, Arizona. At booth #43, attendees can look at the company’s recently revealed Yale Relay™ lift truck automation platform and award-winning Yale Reliant™ operator assist technology.
Yale Relay is a brand-new approach to automation that addresses key cost and complexity barriers that may have previously prevented warehouses from adopting automated lift trucks. Yale Relay offers a simple, intuitive drag-and-drop portal that enables operations to deploy automated lift trucks in as little as one day and implement easy, on-the-fly changes while avoiding custom coding requirements typically associated with these tasks. Mapping the facility is as easy as driving the truck manually through the facility, and changing routes is as simple as clicking and dropping waypoints on an interactive map.
Yale Relay also allows warehouses to take advantage of rental agreements that roll all costs into a single monthly or annual fee, including software, hosting fees, and ongoing platform improvements. Rather than incurring the upfront costs and lengthy timelines of engineering studies that CapEx investments in automation require, the rental model enables warehouses to simply pilot their automation program with one or two trucks, with the flexibility to scale as business dictates.
“Yale Relay helps warehouses solve two labor crises at once, addressing the shortage of lift truck operators and the difficulty of sourcing software engineers with the coding skillsets that automation often depends on. But we’re still far from lights-out facilities becoming the norm, and warehouses still need labor for critical material handling tasks. That’s where Yale Reliant lends a helping hand,” says Brad Long, Global Activation Manager, Yale Lift Truck Technologies. “IWLA has a long history of providing valuable support for warehouses that meets them where they are, and we look forward to helping attendees meet the challenges of today while building toward the warehouse of tomorrow.”
The Yale Reliant operator assist technology lineup takes input from the work environment and equipment to alert operators of potential hazards, adjust lift truck performance and address safety concerns in common, indoor warehouse applications. The solution initially launched in 2021 and has since accumulated over 24 million hours of run time on more than 8,300 units deployed in the field.
The system’s Advanced Dynamic Stability technology, which is also available as a standalone solution, calculates the center of gravity of both the lift truck and load and automatically adjusts lift truck performance to reinforce best practices for stability and control. Additional technologies in the suite enable detection of any objects in the path of travel, 360-degree detection of other lift trucks and pedestrians equipped with ultrawideband (UWB) tags, and real-time tracking, which further allows operations to set site-specific operating rules.
