How Much Does Forklift Downtime Costs Your Company

The cost of forklift downtime is one of the biggest concerns for facility managers and maintenance managers as downtime can cost thousands of dollars per hour. The challenge is determining the cost of downtime and how it affects your business. How are you measuring the cost of forklift downtime? Let’s take a look at a few areas to ensure you are taking the necessary areas into account.

What is the Cost of Forklift Downtime?

The cost of forklift downtime refers to the period of time that the actual piece of equipment is non-operational and accumulates tangible and intangible costs that go against the businesses profitability. Let’s take a look at some of the tangible and intangible values.

Forklift Repair Costs

Repair costs is one that all managers will calculate toward the cost of forklift downtime. What is included in the repair costs? Be sure it includes parts, labor and any travel costs.

Lost Production

When product is sitting on the racking system or is not put away when a load comes, there’s a profit associated this act. When the forklift is down, your facilities output is reduced or maybe even down to zero and this can cost your company a lot of money. The lost revenue are the number of units or services produced per hour. This is another aspect of the cost of forklift downtime.

Forklift Ownership

Do you know what the cost of ownership is per forklift or per fleet? Some of the key aspects to this cost includes your leasing or purchased cost in payments, fuel (or energy) costs, maintenance costs then dividing by the hours the forklift is in operation. This can add up fast.

Overhead Cost

Guess what keeps accruing costs even if a single forklift is down? The overhead costs of such as forklift ownership, labor, production all keep adding up as a cost even when one forklift is down.

Cost of New Business

This can cause lots of stress for everyone involved as the company is always trying to uncover new business, and when they do, the facility needs to be ready. When the forklift isn’t ready to work, how do the orders get fulfilled and out the door in time? These are promises the company made to their new customer and can affect the new business due to a single forklift. The cost of forklift downtime can cost the company their new customer.

Summary

Taking into consideration some of the suggested tangible and intangible costs is vital if you want to understand what the cost of forklift downtime can mean to the current operations and future business. By investing in a forklift safety system like SIERA.AI, you’ll be able to minimize your forklift downtime and stay ahead of maintenance, forklift accidents and avoid any cost of injury or fatalities.

Our online telemetry Dashboard will give you the insights you need to stay ahead of the issues. Want to see it? We’ll be happy to show you how quickly the telemetry Dashboard gives you the insights you need to keep your forklift running at peak performance. Contact us today at sales@siera.ai or call us at (512) 817 0702.