Lift Truck Tips: A fleet won’t take care of itself.  Or, will it?

Fleet management, broadly defined as collecting data to improve efficiency, faces one key obstacle: making sense of all that data. The best solutions are able to rapidly distill information about labor, equipment or processes into actionable intelligence. Some even collate all three at the same time. Many fleet managers see significant gains from visibility that replaces gut feelings with optimal decisions—but they still have to make those decisions.

Lew Manci, director of product development for Crown Equipment, says a rising trend in mobile computing is working to remove managers and operators from the minutiae of managing a fleet by allowing the fleet to manage itself. The concept is central to the vision of “The Internet of Things,” in which connected devices like smart phones, lift trucks and mobile computers communicate in parallel without human intervention. Luckily for industry, many of these device interactions are being proven out in the consumer space.

“We foresee the use of consumer mobile devices will enable the integration of disparate tasks with multi-modal functionality,” Manci says. “Picking productivity, labor management, fleet management, and directed workflow will all operate on common devices. That integration means these functions are not just running on the same device but each application interacts and shares information with the others to enhance value.”

The penetration of consumer devices into lift truck fleet management is nascent and has taken many forms— from bring your own device (BYOD) to the deployment of consumer tablets in ruggedized cases.

“A $200 Android tablet is essentially a throw-away device. Even if you get less than nine months of use it’s still a lot less costly than proprietary terminal for $4,000,” says Manci, who suggests the historic mentality of “set it and forget it” in fleet management is not a best practice. “From a technology perspective, it’s probably a better approach to get through the next six months as opposed to looking for a solution that lasts six years. Technology evolves so quickly that another advantage of consumer products is the ability to migrate across the evolution of that technology in a better way.”

While even basic tablets are loaded with sensors and features, the low cost also helps target the most valuable fleet data. A consumer-based platform provides the opportunity to deploy “apps” instead of traditional monolithic software deployments, Manci adds, not to mention that employees’ familiarity with the interfaces eases training time.

“We hear customers talk about being overwhelmed with data, but it’s possible to pursue slices of data and incrementally move in that direction,” he says. “If you are considering a transition to mobile devices, think about the tools available and your specific needs.”

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