Ways to Make Forklift Training Meaningful for the Operator

We all know that forklift drivers need to go through forklift training. But once they are trained and gained experience, how can we continue to make forklift training relevant? If a forklift driver hits the corner of a racking system or stops too quickly, do you know how often that has occurred? Is it the same forklift operator each time or are all…or most of the operators having the same issue? Let’s take a moment to discuss how to make forklift training relevant for your operation.

Where to Start: OSHA Guidelines

The best place to start is to know and understand the OSHA guidelines. Since most of you reading this are familiar or well versed in the OSHA guidelines, then you know it is the foundation to where to start. Once this in place, now you can start to consider moving it to the next level. What does that mean? Data.

Pre-Shift Inspection

It goes without saying that all operators must perform pre-shift inspection on the forklift truck. Okay great! So where are those paper sheets going? Even if a pdf file is made, how are you tallying up the data so you know the trends? Most are not performing this task as it takes a lot of time to put it together. Is there anything that can capture the data, and interpret the data for you? Or alert you when there is a problem, like a failed inspection?

Digital Forklift Inspection

Yes, there is a digital forklift inspection called the S2. This will collect the data and house it in the online Dashboard. This will let you know of the answers to all of the questions and calculate the answers. In addition, it will notify in real-time when a forklift has failed an inspection. Next, any incidents that occur are also tracked, such as near misses, low, medium and high impacts. Digital impact detections can track what’s going on, paper cannot.

How Can We Make Forklift Training Relevant?

How can we make forklift training relevant? With the digital captured data. Let’s say for instance there are frequent hard stops. Would you have known? Probably not. But now that you do know, you’ll be able to answer the questions…are the hard stops caused:

• In a certain area of the facility
• Due to a new forklift driver
• Or being experienced by multiple forklift drivers
• Because there’s something in the way, like a box, product, or liquid on the floor, that’s causing the hard stop to occur
• Or? Another reason that we haven’t discussed?

Once you know the answer, you have a better idea of what action to take. You can make forklift training relevant by giving focused training to one driver or a few drivers on a particular situation. Or you can perform training on how to handle particular liquids if it’s on the floor. What if you deal with flammable chemicals?

Overall…

The bottom line is that digital data collection will help make forklift training relevant because you will have the best information in front of you. The problem won’t have a chance to mature over time creating a scenario that can be more dangerous and cause injury. 

Contact us today at sales@siera.ai to learn more about the S2 Digital Inspection with Impact Detection.