Forklift manufacturing powerhouse Toyota on Tuesday opened a $100 million lift truck manufacturing facility at the Columbus, Indiana, headquarters of its Toyota Material Handling North America (TMHNA) division, marking a significant expansion for the company that already produces some 40% of forklifts sold in the U.S.
The 295,000-square foot factory will expand production at the site by producing electric forklifts for both the company’s Toyota and Raymond brands, bringing TMHNA’s total Columbus footprint to 1.9 million square feet “under roof.” Toyota and Raymond merged their operations in 2025, forming a new corporate entity called TMHNA. That expansion was soon followed by another repositioning when Japanese parent company TICO reorganized its warehouse automation providers—Vanderlande, viastore, and Bastian—into a single unit called Toyota Automated Logistics (TAL).
Now operating in Indiana, the company’s newest factory will produce the electric Class 1 Stand-Up Counterbalanced Forklift, which until recently was built only at the TMHNA factory in Greene, N.Y. Shifting the production location to the Midwest will allow the New York factory to transition to building products such as reach trucks, order pickers, and automation, company leaders said in remarks delivered at an opening ceremony in Columbus on Wednesday.
The move will also boost Toyota’s ability to meet soaring market demand for electric-powered lift trucks, TMHNA President & CEO Brett Wood said. “In 2023, 66% of all lift trucks sold in North America were electric powered, and currently the market is approximately 70% electric. The electric forklift demand is likely to reach 80% before 2035, and our new factory is poised to address this electrification trend,” Wood said.
Continuous improvement in the factory
A tour of the new factory showed that it features a blend of automation and human craftsmanship that positions the facility to adapt as customers’ needs evolve, including quickly expanding assembly lines as needed. For instance, the building is producing about eight forklifts per day now, and will ramp that up to 24 per day by September. Adjacent factory buildings on the Columbus campus produce even greater volumes of other models.
That quick rate of production is critical because Toyota says it does not produce its forklifts for stock, but rather applies “lean management” strategies to build them on demand. And that agility is important because 75% of the forklifts produced there are built to individual customer specifications, including options such as the 14 different varieties of seats that can be installed in any vehicle.
To maintain its pace of work, Toyota follows lean manufacturing precepts that are forever being tweaked and improved through “Kaizen,” or continuous improvement. The goal of those approaches is to eliminate waste in eight different categories: transportation of parts, inventory, motion of people or equipment, waiting for a previous process, overproduction, over processing, defects, and skills of individuals.
Even as those improvements are being made, the forklift factories are fed by “just in time” deliveries of the parts needed to build each vehicle. Some 60% of the parts by value are sourced from sites in North America, but TMHNA’s largest import supplier is Japan, where parent company TICO creates common components for all the vehicles in its large catalog, says Tony Miller, chief supply officer for TMHNA.
Since the Columbus plant doesn’t order parts until immediately before they’re needed, supply chain delays can cause big trouble. That challenge has grown worse since the covid pandemic, So TMHNA recently added a foreign trade zone (FTZ) to its Columbus campus, allowing the company to bring imported goods directly to the site instead of waiting for shipments to clear U.S. Customs inspections at distant ports or railyards.
“There are a lot of things that can happen outside your control. Especially when you consider both our suppliers and our suppliers’ own supply chains,” Miller said. “So we work on identifying delays proactively, in enough time to recover. We focus on keeping the sequence [of factory forklift assembly steps]. The sequence is sacred.”