Lift truck technology: Elevating the entire facility

In the last few years, the concept of fleet management has been spreading throughout lift truck fleets of all sizes. At their most basic, fleet management practices work to help fleet owners spend as little as possible on equipment, maintenance, and operators while ensuring any investments made are worthwhile.

For some, a bit more discipline around tying planned maintenance intervals to hour meter readings is a good place to start. For others, real-time management of each penny is supported by a suite of integrated hardware and software technologies, most of which only emerged in the last decade.

In all cases, the closer inspection of fleet costs and processes is painting an increasingly comprehensive picture of the impact a well-managed fleet can have on not just pallet moves per hour, but the efficiency of the entire business.

In conversations with an assortment of lift truck suppliers, the general sense is that fleet management practices are poised for yet another significant shift, from something that promotes efficiency in the once-ignored lift truck fleet into a key part of an “operational management system.”

This gives the fleet an equal footing with other production, labor, and inventory management disciplines in terms of visibility, productivity, and interconnectedness.

In fact, the lift truck no longer plays a supportive role by simply helping move materials from one value-added station to another, but has become an integral part of ensuring value throughout an operation.

“The transition from fleet management to operational management is a natural extension of analyzing each piece of the whole,” says Alan Marder, director of technology solutions at Raymond. “When you look at parts, lift trucks, and operators, you see that each is connected to a number of other elements in the warehouse. When you improve one piece, it impacts the others, and technology can help make that happen while quantifying the results.”

Learning from the lift truck
Basic or even standard lift truck technologies can help transform the lift truck into a powerful communication hub. It can report the status and location of equipment and personnel to managers in real time, and it can automatically notify maintenance personnel of any fault code or failed inspection, which can help achieve a near 100 percent first-time repair rate.

Most importantly, a connected lift truck can facilitate responsiveness as business conditions change.
“It is certainly not what it used to be 40 years ago, when customers would make a five-year plan for their fleets, and five years later be working with the same exact specifications,” says Mike McKean, fleet management sales and marketing manager for Toyota Material Handling, USA. “Today we run into seasonal periods and times when a forklift needs to be used differently in the course of a year. Many customers are more focused on moving materials than being efficient, but technology inside and connected to the forklift can make it much easier to fine tune equipment to the application.”

Ideally, fleet management is not handled as a separate discipline, but is instead closely tied to available data from all systems. Because warehouse management systems (WMS) and inventory management software is becoming less costly, even a small company can plug and play and begin to collect good information about the lift truck fleet.

Perry Ardito, general manager of Jungheinrich’s warehouse products group for Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America, says data from a WMS or fleet management software can help fleet managers make better decisions than ever before.

“They can become more intimate with all of the happenings inside a facility, including where product is stored, when it is moved, and the performance of the lift truck and its operator,” says Ardito. “Technology in the lift truck allows for communication between the equipment, maintenance personnel, the equipment manufacturer, and the customer so that they can make the right decisions to get better and cheaper performance. In fact, we’re very close to having the lift truck communicate to us in advance of a problem.”

Jim Gaskell, director of Global Insite Products for Crown Equipment, says he’s seeing more fleet management being connected from a service standpoint to the whole data suite, so managers know what each unit is doing and when it is being serviced. These figures are critical to understanding overall utilization.

“Telematics often tell them they are using equipment 40 percent of the time as opposed to the 100 percent they assume,” Gaskell says. “Some observe utilization all the way up to 65 percent, but it’s still much lower than they expect.”

When a customer sees that 40 percent figure, they want to dig deeper to find out which units they use the least, what peak utilization looks like, and how many lift trucks they might be able to remove. “Every new discovery changes the application,” says Gaskell, from overall fleet reductions to the smallest costs. “If you look at maintenance for each lift truck you might see that some go through tires more quickly than others. What is happening in that part of the warehouse?”

Labor, management, and systems
With the growing popularity of outsourced service arrangements, businesses of all sizes have shifted focus from maintenance to the operator, who accounts for nearly 70 percent of a lift truck’s cost over its life. Reducing and optimizing the fleet size is a good way to target these costs, but managers can find value in information about the utilization of both the equipment and the operator.

McKean suggests customers visualize two buckets, one for the available hours on the forklift and another for labor at X dollars per eight hours. “You’re paying for those eight hours regardless,” he says. “But in the other bucket, you might have 28 percent idle time when the forklift is not in use. Accounting for breaks and lunch, maybe only 15 percent of that idle time is waste. Why are you paying the operator at 100 percent when the lift truck is only in use 85 percent of the time?”

Technology can inform mangers about what the operator is doing—and what they could be doing. “Forklift technology can help you manage someone who is not on the lift truck,” McKean says. “It’s an opportunity to assign tasks like cleaning up to avoid damage from shrink wrap caught around an axle. They’re little things, but until you have the tools to get that information you can’t create an action plan.”

To keep track of operators wherever they are, operator access controls intended for lift trucks might even be fitted to other equipment. Marder offers the example of a customer with robotic shrink wrappers that require operator input. “At the robot, the driver swipes the same ID card he or she uses on the lift truck and it tells the system the operator is on a shrink wrap machine instead of the lift truck,” Marder says.

Jungheinrich’s Ardito estimates that perhaps 20 percent of customers are using access control systems that allow tracking of unique operators. “Of the remaining 80 percent, maybe 50 percent have a procedure and protocol in place, and the other 30 percent keep their fingers crossed and hope operators make good decisions,” Ardito says. “For a lot of customers, they need a paradigm shift from what they were doing previously, whether for people, processes or equipment. Each piece of equipment and each operator has to be committed to task at hand in order to do more with less.”

The first layer of fleet management adoption typically targets standard reports: who logged on, idle time, and travel with or without a load. “We now realize those are just the basics,” Gaskell says, “and customers are ready to go beyond that.” Still, some customer with a labor management module in their WMS feel they don’t need labor data from the lift truck.

“But there can be a real benefit to pulling in that data, since a pure standard doesn’t tell you why an operator fell below standard,” Gaskell explains. “And it goes both ways; the lift truck can help you either identify why performance fell short or why a certain operator is performing well above standard so you can replicate that. Even ‘Mom and Pop’ operations that don’t have labor management systems can use lift trucks to get basic labor management functionality.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Marder says capturing and integrating data from the WMS, time clock, battery, maintenance, utilization and budget can provide a daily, comprehensive and real-time view of costs. For example, it is possible to identify how much it should cost to put away 1,000 cases.

“If it should have cost $3,500, but really cost $4,200, managers can jump on that immediately,” says Marder. “Instead of reviewing reports monthly, a manager can access a daily report revealing details about each event. An engineered labor standard can tell you a task is budgeted for 50 seconds, but now you can see the lift truck’s speed, route and actions that resulted in that task taking 75 seconds.”

Aggregating data from multiple sources can also ensure the right equipment is used for the right job. One of Marder’s customers had a fleet including reach trucks, pallet jacks, and sit-down counterbalanced trucks. “The customer was performing low-level picking, and we showed them they were using reach trucks for that task,” Marder recalls. “Pallet jacks, which should have been used in that application, were only used 17 percent of time. They were paying 65 cents a case with the reach trucks, and only 26 cents with a pallet jack.”

The brains of the operation
In addition to increased visibility into maintenance costs, both standard and optional features can help control fuel costs. Richard Pulcini, Class I product manager for Yale Materials Handling Corporation, notes the rise of electric lift trucks in recent years, from roughly 40 percent of the market to as much as 60 percent. Combined with customer interest in efficiency, the growth of electrics has resulted in solutions to challenges once considered unavoidable.

Years ago, Pulcini says, DC lift truck controls created a performance drop-off toward the end of a battery’s capacity. With new AC controls, he says, customers can expect the same performance at the beginning and end of a shift. Pulcini says there is an industry trend to migrate toward the AC platform, which reduces the number of components subject to failure and frequent maintenance while boosting runtime. But AC-based lift
trucks give users even more tools to control productivity.

“Motor controllers can be mapped for two or more levels,” Pulcini explains. “One might prioritize efficiency for long-runtime applications. The second could encompass a suite of settings in the lift truck that provides high performance. For most of the year, a customer is focused on fuel costs, so they run in economy mode. Come the holiday season, they more worried about getting product out the door.”

Right now, the norm is that lift truck performance might be tailored to a particular operator and area, Pulcini says, but that programmability might never be revisited after the initial setup. Combined with numerical pass codes unique to each operator, a supervisor can configure a number of modes suited to new trainees, veteran operators, or somewhere in between.

This programmability is not unique to electric lift trucks either, Pulcini says. Internal combustion models also offer adjustable parameters to slow acceleration and lean out the fuel mixtures for maximum efficiency. “In this way, as performance decreases, fuel economy increases,” he says, “which better synchronizes the fuel costs with the level of activity.”

Even after unifying costs and utilization, Toyota’s McKean warns against the old tendency to settle into a routine. “If you’re at the top of your game, the key to continued success lies in the data,” he says. “You own that data, and now it needs dedicated resources to make the best of it. How can you get better? Can you make maintenance even more efficient, improve uptime, make operators safer? The point is not to achieve an ROI; the point is to push on.”