Physicians relied on folklore and guesswork to treat life-and-death ailments. Understandably, the results were a mixed bag until advanced medical texts were discovered during the Crusades. Suddenly, physicians had access to information that allowed them to make decisions based on empirical data instead of intuition.
These discoveries brought the medical world out of the Dark Ages and into the modern era. Your forklift fleet is going through a similar revolution right now. Forklift fleet management systems provide access to the data you need to optimize your operation. Stop letting your fleet linger in the dark ages and start your company’s renaissance. Read on to learn how to optimize your forklift fleet.
Forklift fleet management optimization is a buzzword these days. Yet, it’s undoubtedly one that comes with tangible benefits, like improved safety, reduced costs, and boosted efficiency.
While a safer workforce is a worthy goal in and of itself, there are significant monetary advantages to improving forklift fleet safety. At present, there are about 34,900 serious accidents and 85 fatalities involving forklifts in the U.S. each year. According to the National Safety Council, each forklift accident costs employers an average of $38,000 in direct costs, like medical expenses, and an additional $150,000 in indirect costs, such as lost productivity.
An optimized fleet is a safer fleet. Optimized fleets experience lower-than-average accident rates. This protects workers, keeping them happier and more productive while simultaneously protecting your organization from costly injuries and fines.
An optimized forklift fleet also reduces waste. Optimization minimizes fuel costs, maintenance expenses, and labor costs. In fact, most companies report a 10% to 20% reduction in operating costs after undergoing forklift fleet optimization. These savings don’t come from any single change but from dozens of small, data-driven improvements that add up to significant reductions in wasted time and effort.
Beyond cost savings, optimization increases your earning potential. Employees waste less time on routine tasks such as picking and restocking. Consequently, they spend more time adding value each shift. With every employee operating at peak efficiency, your whole warehouse department begins doing more with fewer resources, boosting your profit margins.
The optimization process is unique to each business, but there are four general steps that every company will take.
The first step toward optimization is to identify areas of inefficiency and waste. You accomplish this by assessing your fleet's current situation. There are many things you'll want your team to examine, but here are a few primary areas to get your managers started.
Facility Layout. Facility layouts are often slow to change because the time and effort required are rarely prioritized. However, if your layout lags behind your needs, it can create major inefficiencies that sap your productivity at every turn. Commonly, layouts result from legacy upgrades/expansions without a strategic efficiency review for years or even decades.
As a result, the flow of your fastest-moving products is impeded, and your pickers waste time with every run. Likewise, if your forklifts work for narrow aisles and your aisle width has not changed, you’re sacrificing valuable storage space. Have your team examine everything from picking routes to aisle width.
Forklift Workloads. Your storage organization will determine many of the demands placed on your forklifts. For example, if you have heavy pallets stored in high bays, your fleet needs a large lifting capacity, but you can reduce that need by moving heavy pallets lower. Have your team examine where products live throughout your warehouse and what kinds of forklift capabilities are actually required to meet those needs.
Fleet Capabilities. Next, have your team look into the capabilities of your current fleet. Take a thorough inventory of the types of forklifts you have, their lifting capacities, any special attachments, and their ages. Compare this to the assessment of the workload to determine whether your current fleet inventory is adequate, insufficient, or excessive.
The fleet size should be determined by the required maximum volume cycles – how far a forklift needs to go and return. After the maximum number is determined, you should ensure that you can not spread the demand over time to reduce the investment in equipment and operations further. For instance, if you can reduce the number of trucks loaded simultaneously, you can lower your costs. Finally, you should have an idea of how much downtime costs if a forklift is out of service and balance that against having too large a fleet. As a general rule, the number of forklift operators should align closely with the number of lifts.
Operator Skill Sets. While your forklift fleet is a powerful tool, it is only as effective as its operators are skilled. Unfortunately, not all forklift operator training programs are equal. Have your supervisors evaluate the training, experience, and productivity of your operators. Determine whether there are knowledge gaps that managers can rectify with additional training programs. Invest in experienced operators to improve efficiency and safety among your team.
2. Make Data-Driven Decisions
Once you and your team have identified areas of inefficiency and waste, the next step is to create data-driven solutions. Here, you might be tempted to rely solely on the experience of your veteran managers. However, experience and intuition can be misleading. Instead, turn to your forklift fleet management software and telematics to collect data on your fleet.
Hone in on the metrics that really matter and have your team do a deep analysis of this data. The metrics you'll focus on may be different from facility to facility, but here are a few that often yield significant insights:
Use these insights to generate solutions for the inefficiencies you and your team identified. Harnessing big data like this gives you a powerful tool to understand what is actually happening with your fleet and what changes will have the biggest impact. Better yet, monitoring this data before and after implementing your solutions will help you better understand which actions really were effective and which still require tweaking.
As you implement your forklift fleet management solutions, keep an eye on safety and forklift uptime. These two metrics will save you the most money and provide the biggest boosts to efficiency. As you analyze your data, you'll discover that one of the most impactful things your fleet manager can do is establish a planned maintenance schedule.
No one disputes the importance of forklift maintenance, but planned maintenance sometimes receives only lip service. When a forklift operates well, it can seem like a waste of time and resources to pull it off the line for a tune-up. Yet, these relatively short periods of planned downtime prevent larger periods of unexpected downtime caused by breakdowns. Breakdowns not only bring your productivity to a dead stop; they also put your forklift operators at risk and increase the accident rate within your facility.
A lack of planned maintenance can cut the economic life of a forklift in half. Beware of low-cost planned maintenance, in general, as good routine maintenance on all forklifts requires an investment of one to two hours. With anything less, something will be missed. Accepting a low-priced maintenance rate encourages your provider to wish for breakdowns. Compared to the cost of lost productivity (which can cost thousands per hour) and the cost of worker injuries, planned maintenance is an inexpensive tool to safeguard your bottom line.
The final step in your optimization journey is to keep fine-tuning your forklift fleet. Your initial changes are likely to be relatively large and yield significant benefits. However, if you and your team keep monitoring your telematics, you'll start to notice finer changes that could further optimize performance. These will be things like right-sizing your forklift fleet, empowering operators, and streamlining picking routes. Continually implementing these data-driven refinements will create a culture of continual improvement and ensure your fleet stays on the cutting edge of your industry.
Throughout the entire forklift fleet optimization process, there is one thing you can do to make everything easier: choose a high-quality forklift fleet management partner. A strong partner has the skills and experience to make the optimization process streamlined and pain-free. There's no need for you to create your own optimization team from scratch when we have the date-driven know-how to work with your existing teams and get the job done right. Let us revolutionize your fleet. Contact us online or at one of our locations throughout Georgia and Florida to learn more about forklift fleet management solutions or to request a quote.
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