Can Forklift Inspections Reduce the Cost of Forklift Downtime?

Forklift downtime cuts into a company’s profit margin and productivity. If you want to make the most from your purchase and maximize the forklift’s capabilities, it’s critical to take preventative measures to ensure optimal performance. Let’s take a look at preventative measures, including the forklift inspection that can help to reduce the cost of forklift downtime.

What is Forklift Downtime?

Forklift downtime is the collective number of hours a forklift remains out of operation due to repairs or maintenance. Now, that’s not to say that a forklift should have zero downtime. Every forklift needs to come out of circulation to be checked in order to reach optimal performance. If managed with the best information possible, then the forklift uptime can always be at its peak. Is that possible?

The Cost of Forklift Downtime

Each forklift will have a cost associated with being out of operation. You have the obvious cost of the parts for the repair as well as the labor needed to fix the problem. But there’s other costs that sometimes is overlooked. Here are the top 3 expenses that need to be added to the cost of a forklift downtime:

1. You just purchased the part – now you need to pay expedited shipping fees to get it to you quickly, especially if you don’t have it in your own inventory.
2. Rental fees for bringing in a temporary replacement to keep your operation functioning.

Business productivity is reduced or lost due to slipped or missed deadlines.

Keep Record of Each Lift Truck

Each lift truck is different. It may have a different purpose, or function within your facility and needs to be tracked and the data recorded. Each record should contain basic information such as purchase date, first use date, what was the price for this particular lift truck, the manufacturer, model and serial number. Now that the foundation has been established, the rest is going to be the recording of preventative maintenance and repairs.

The Old Way of Inspecting a Forklift

We all know the old way (or maybe the current way for some) is paper. Grab that clipboard or booklet and start answering the same question, listed in the same order. Maintenance needs the forklift driver to take the forklift inspection seriously. But the truth is that not every forklift driver does. Not every driver includes the meter reading for the forklift. Let’s be honest, not every forklift driver is performing a proper inspection on the forklift truck 100% of the time. It’s only then that a maintenance manager may notice a problem with the forklift.

However, what the facility, fleet and/or maintenance manager must do is review the forklift sheets or booklet each week and try to figure out from paper if there’s a growing issue with the forklift. It’s not easy to figure out with paper-based forklift inspections. Yes, the information may be there, but how are you tracking? Are you making a spreadsheet? Creating PDFs of each forklift sheet? Or making special notes in the booklet? It does become a bit of an inconsistent mess.

The New Way: Forklift Digital Inspection

By digitizing the forklift inspection, this can go a long way to reducing the forklift downtime. Let’s take a look at how:

• Accountability: The forklift driver is accountable for the health of check of the forklift by swiping the driver’s badge or entering in a PIN number. The forklift won’t start without it.
• Meter Reading: Let’s get that done up front. The driver is to record digitally the meter reading. This becomes a more accurate way of knowing the use of the lift truck.
• Questions and Answers: You have a list of questions and answers you need to know that is also required by OSHA for compliance. But maybe you want to ask it a bit differently. Or maybe you want to add questions, or edit answers that are more reflective of your facility. With a digital forklift safety system, you can make those changes anytime you want within the telemetry Dashboard.
• Accuracy of Answers: You know…and the forklift driver knows the order of the questions and that can lead to pencil whipping on paper or even digitally. So what if you ‘turn on’ with a toggle to randomize the questions…better yet why don’t you also randomize the answers. Now for forklift driver has to look at each question and find the right answer. It’ll be obvious to the forklift driver that if he/she is trying to ‘beat the system’, they will quickly find out that the forklift inspection failed and they are not going anywhere.

Accuracy is Money

Now that you have a digital way to inspect the forklift, and you have a more accurate way of collecting great data, you can visually track the forklift truck’s health which will reduce the forklift’s downtime. Those top three costs mentioned earlier will reduce or maybe even disappear. The benefit is that you will have a telemetry Dashboard that will quickly tell you the answers to the questions so you can determine the health of each lift truck.

What to do Next?

Contact us at sales@siera.ai for a demo of the S2 Digital Inspection with Impact Detection. That’s right, we didn’t even get to the bonus part of the S2 System: tracking the safety score, near misses, low, medium and high impacts. We’ll show you how it works.