Tracking Potential Accidents is Like Preventative Maintenance for Forklifts

Do you want to track forklift accidents? You would think this would be an easy question. However, it depends on who you are asking. If it’s management, the answer is ‘yes’, track forklift accidents! If it’s those responsible for the operation of the facility, it leans more toward ‘no’. Just prevent the accident from happening. Let’s take a closer look as to why it is important to track forklift accidents. It’s not necessarily counting how many forklift accidents you’ve had, it’s more about preventative.

Track Forklift Accidents and What Does it Mean?

In order to track forklift accidents, you need a bit of technology to help. The technology on the forklift identifies when a forklift accident occurs, then transmits that finding to a Dashboard for reporting. The Dashboard is where you can find the answer to ‘how many’ accidents. This information should be available to those with authorization at any time of day or night. But what if you want to know more? What if you want to more than to track forklift accidents? What if you can track an accident in its infancy?

The Infancy of a Forklift Accident

How many times have you said, ‘That corner on Main St and Second is such a dangerous corner. There’s always a car accident.” The next question in your mind is, ‘Why don’t they do something about it?’ As a result, you do what you can to avoid that corner because you don’t want to become a statistic and have a car accident. Technology today allows you to do something about it in your facility. Workers can’t avoid high risk areas as they need to get their job done. So, why haven’t you done something about it?

Getting Close to the Source

One way to track forklift accidents is to identify where the ‘hot spots’ are at in the facility. This doesn’t necessarily mean where the actual impacts occur, this can mean, where did the accident ALMOST occur. We call these ‘Near Misses’. SIERA.AI’s forklift safety solution tracks near misses with its AI machine learning technology. What is a near miss? Let’s find out more.

Near Miss Forklift Accidents

Near miss forklift accident is when there was ‘almost’ an accident. It didn’t create the impact, instead the forklift driver slammed on their brakes, or hit the brakes quickly just for a second. These types of scenarios would be classified as a near miss. When these near misses are tracked and tabulated in the Dashboard, it begins to tell a story, it reveals what is going on in key areas of your facility. Would you already know about the areas? Maybe…maybe not.

By tracking near misses, you’ll be able to identify areas that are prone to accidents. These are areas that are problems in its infancy. You can change or alter that area to reduce the amount of near misses so it never gets the chance to mature. What if it does? Then you start to have low level impacts.

Low Level Forklift Impacts

Low level forklift impacts include bumps here and bumps there. It causes some damage and weakness in the infrastructure such as your racking systems. That will cost you money as any impact to the racking system begins to change the load capacity. By tracking low level forklift impacts, this will tell you that those near miss areas are maturing and now damage is being caused. This is your best time to change the scenario and avoid future forklift accidents.    

So Let’s Stop There…

We all know what medium and high impacts are all about. We’re talking damages, injuries and even fatalities. So, why aren’t you tracking this vital information? Get started now with a SIERA.AI forklift safety system that tracks what you need to know before your facility becomes a statistic. Contact us today at sales@siera.ai.