Can a Forklift Safety System Extend the Life of a Forklift?
It has been a challenge. You place an order for new forklifts only to find out that you need to wait 12 to 18 months for delivery. How can you extend the life of forklift to ensure your operation doesn’t get affected? Companies are constantly challenged with downtime, maintenance and productivity issues. Can a forklift safety system help keep lift trucks running or better yet extend the life of forklift? Let’s take a further look.
What Does it Mean to Extend the Life of Forklift?
Extend the life of forklift means safety and maintenance professionals are tasked to maximize the return on investment for all lift trucks. Companies can have various combinations to measure and track, even with OSHA etools, but the goal all remains the same: how can we extend the lift of forklift trucks safely especially when the lead time for delivery is a year or more out.
Downtime Issues and Solution
There’s nothing worse than having a lift truck out of commission. Most companies try to keep one or two forklift trucks on reserve for when breakdowns occur. But not everyone has that luxury. Downtime means there’s a loss of money. This can be reflected in the forklift not being productive and the cost of getting the forklift repaired with labor and parts, to name a few.
The question is how did the downtime occur? And more importantly, could downtime have been averted?
Solution: One way to extend the lift of forklift is to have better, more accurate information on the health of the forklift trucks. Yes, you may be performing forklift inspections, but are they being done accurately or is ‘pencil whipping’ the norm. Do you also know the results? Results that can be analyzed so you can be proactive on your inspections?
The S2 Digital Inspection with Impact Detection digitizes the forklift inspection and increases the accuracy of the answers by randomizing the questions AND the answers. Now this strongly encourages reading and answering questions more thoughtfully. If the forklift inspection fails, you’ll know ASAP as the forklift safety system notifies you of the failure. As the manager, you’ll have the authority to view the telemetry Dashboard, which tells you all that you want to know all on one screen.
Maintenance Issues and Solutions
We have a tendency to be selective on our maintenance. We do a great job of maintaining our cars, as we realized what happens when a car breaks down. No fun, especially if you get stranded. But what about your lawn mower or HVAC system. Are you good at maintaining that?
Most…not all do perform some sort of maintenance on lift trucks. The more you use, the more it needs to be checked. Forklifts get a pounding each day. These forklifts are certainly ones that need to be maintained. How can the maintenance manager know there’s a problem, or stay on top of the situation. Yes, the maintenance manager is following the suggested maintenance procedure as per manufacturer’s recommendation, but is that enough?
Solution: Again, this is a perfect solution for the S2 Digital Inspection. By digitally tracking and seeing the results, and getting any special notes indicated on the S2, maintenance can stay ahead of the problem(s) and keep the lift trucks from experiencing potential breakdowns, or jolts or other moves that can affect the load. In addition, the S2 reports on impacts: low, medium and high. This will also affect the maintenance and repair with potentially more inspections due to the severity of the impact.
Productivity Issues and Solution
We saved this one for last as the first two are what affects productivity. If there’s a problem, or an impact, or even a near miss, productivity is affected. Isn’t this the ultimate goal? How can high productivity exist with low to no incidents.
Solution: If you need more than the digital inspection and impact detection, then you go to the S3 Pedestrian Detection System. This allows you to provide warnings to the forklift driver if a pedestrian or an object is nearby allowing for accidents or impacts to be averted.
Summary
Technology is the open door to extend the lift of forklift. SIERA.AI’s machine learning AI technology will extend the life of the forklift with proactive safety measures with alerts, impact tracking, forklift inspections and a digital telemetry Dashboard giving you the information you need to make an informed decision for your drivers. Contact us at sales@siera.ai.
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