Labor management for your lift trucks

The data collected by a fleet management system can be used to make your drivers, and your fleet, more productive.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/7/2007

“Yes, but what have you done for me lately?”

That’s the way many warehouse and distribution center managers must feel as they try to continually drive down operational costs and improve productivity. Today, many facilities are implementing labor management systems to make operators more efficient and build on the improvements gained from a warehouse management system (WMS).

A fleet management system takes operational information from a different place--think of it as a labor management system for your lift trucks.

“When a customer first starts with us, it’s not unusual to find that their drivers are being paid for an 8-hour day when they are only logged onto their equipment for 4 to 6 hours,” says Ken Ehrman, president and chief operating officer of I.D. Systems. “What’s more, those drivers are only in motion for 2 to 3 hours, and actually moving a load just 1 to 1.5 hours per shift.”

It’s not that lift truck drivers are asleep at the wheel, Ehrman adds. Often it’s because the lift truck is not being properly used.

That’s where a fleet management system enters. It can:

Monitor pick up and drop off locations throughout a facility over time. That allows a manager to position equipment where it’s most needed.

Enable better performance from your equipment in real time. For instance, fleet management systems enable two-way communication between a supervisor and a driver to reallocate work as it’s needed.

Monitor and assign work for jobs that aren’t effectively managed by a WMS. “A receiving dock is dynamic,” says Ehrman. “You assign work when a truck arrives to be loaded or unloaded.”

Track how long it took to perform a job and more. Also track the route a driver took, the time spent in motion and the time spent lifting a load. That information can be fed back into a labor management system to create engineered labor standards.