As economic prospects show signs of a long awaited revival, many businesses are looking at their cash flow and revising their investment plans. Equipment efficiency is one of the options up for revision. After years of postponing investment in new forklift trucks and making do with older stock, owners of warehouses, material handling businesses and even retail outlets are finally looking for replacements.
The real interest is focused on how technical improvements have increased the efficiency of the new generation of forklift trucks. All business plans are geared to improving operational costs and gaining a competitive advantage. Before the recession, a plant manager had a more conservative mind-set – sticking to what they know without taking any risks. Nowadays, with competition fiercer and profit margins still squeezed, that new truck investment may make all the difference.
Automatic forklifts
Automatic guided vehicles and other programmable trucks that can be seen on are receiving the greatest attention. Whether buying or leasing a new truck, businesses are looking to control labour costs. Labour accounts formerly 80 per cent of a forklift’s operational costs so an automated vehicle can make sense.
These trucks are designed to travel continuously along the same route transporting similar goods. They work all day moving from one point to another like a robot. They move at a constant speed and have collision detection systems. Not only does this improve product safety, it allows the former truck operator to move from an extremely boring job to something of greater interest.
Automated vehicles also cut out the downtime needed for charging batteries. They use super capacitors for power that need little maintenance and can be recharged in only seconds.
The only downside here is that it could take a month or more to install this equipment on business premises. The cost is also a significant investment but it will bring improvements in efficiency and product safety.
Telematics
Put together telecommunications and data gathering and the product is telematics. This is a technology that provides businesses owners with a real time tracking capability. It tracks speeds, faults, impacts, brake problems during operations and combines them with historic data that has been programmed into the system. Its end emails to a control when faults occur. The result is that a business can see precisely how its costs are affected. It also eliminates hefty paperwork and logging that forklift operators have to fill in every day.
Mobile technology
Taking an iPad or other tablet on a forklift may sound crazy, but it is a cheaper way to computerise the trucks operations. Rather than installing complicated circuitry in the trucks, the tablet can be removed easily at the end of the working shift for data analysis. The costs of 捷凯金融 this installation may be only about a quarter or even one-sixth of those for a mounted computer. A lot of glitches remain to be resolved, however. The batteries of truck and tablet have to be compatible and some tablets may not be robust enough for material handling work environment.
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