Safety on a Forklift with Dashboard Analytics

When we say, safety on a forklift with dashboard analytics, we mean data…real-time data that leads to practical decisions about safety in your facility or facilities. Why is this important? Because you’re trying to reach one of four goals: 1. Reduce accidents that cause injury or death, 2. Reduce equipment costs which can include forklift to forklift, forklift to equipment in the facility or forklift to any part of the infrastructure of the facility. 3. Reduce product damage that can be your own or your customers and 4. Lower insurance premiums because you got numbers one through three under control. This is how safety on a forklift is obtained.

Gathering Data on a Forklift

Before we can get to the data, let’s quickly discuss what is needed to capture the information. The forklift safety system, or S3 Pedestrian Detection system is installed on each forklift. The two main components are the forklift monitoring system, which is what scans every 60ms searching for pedestrians and objects, and the touchscreen displays the warnings by providing audio and visual cues as well. This is what stops the forklift from having an accident.  

At the same time, the forklift collision system is capturing data and sending it to a central repository, or the online telemetry Dashboard. Here, you’ll be able to review the data and make educated decisions.

Incident Dashboard

The incident dashboard gives you everything you want to know in one location. The screen capture is real data for a customer from May 1 through May 31, 2022. They currently have S3 Pedestrian Detection with a few worksites and plenty of forklifts.  Let’s discuss their results.

Near Miss Pedestrian Detection

The machine learning AI technology can determine what is an object and what is a pedestrian. It reports on how many near misses for a pedestrian and how many for an object. A near miss is when the forklift almost hit something. It got close, but the forklift driver swerved or slammed on their brakes to avoid a collision.

The S3 Pedestrian Detection system goes one step further. It also tells you the distance of the pedestrian upon notification. Here are a few examples: Truck 1 detected a pedestrian near miss 10 times on 5/31. The distances were 8.39 ft, 6.81 ft, 7.76 ft, 5.5 ft, 9.37 ft, 4.88 ft, 5.58 ft, 5.7 ft, 5.8 ft, 5.24. If you were able to collect this data, how would you interpret it? What other questions would you ask?

Near Miss Object Detection

Now let’s take a look at a near hit or near miss object detection on the same day. The forklift safety system detected 29 near miss object detections. It ranges from 1.56 ft to 3.1 ft. If you have these calculations amongst 2 forklifts, what would this mean to you? What changes would you make to reduce a potential accident? Remember, these are almost hits, so you have the opportunity to analyze the area and make changes.

Forklift Impacts

For the ultimate safety on a forklift is impact detection. This allows you to decide for your company what is a low, medium and high impact by G force. Is a 5G force medium or high for your company. Is an 2G force low or even medium. This is an answer that is reflected in what you need for your company at a particular time. That’s why we allow you to set your own threshold in the telemetry Dashboard because everyone is a little different.

This customer set their impact at 5G. You may consider it medium, but for them, they thought it was high. They had 7 high impacts in May 2022. They knew who the forklift operator(s) were, analyzed the time of day to determine shifts and created a plan to help these two forklift operators from making the same error again in the future.

Analysis

Gathering data is only useful when you apply it to how you can improve safety on a forklift. If you were to capture data, what would you do with it? So here’s what we suggest next. Find out for yourself…meaning get a trial of the S3 Pedestrian Detection safety system from SIERA.AI and install it on 2-3 of your forklifts. Next, collect the data for a week or two and begin to ‘see’ what you haven’t experienced before. What insights to you gain? We’ll talk about it once you get the data in our telemetry Dashboard. Start by contacting us today at sales@siera.ai.