How much expense is wasted running your forklift fleet? If you are like most forklift owners, you don’t really know.  You may know how much you spent for maintenance for any period of time, but you probably don’t know if it was well spent. I spend a lot of my time analyzing fleet maintenance data.  The key to an active fleet management system is collecting data that is granular and timely enough to provide actionable decisions.

Sure data is a critical part of the system, but you need to add industry knowledge to turn that data into customized reports that can provide insight so that you can make factually based decisions. First and foremost, if you collect accurate and detailed usage data you will be able to determine if you have the right equipment doing the right work.  Then, using the other data collected, you can determine not only maintenance costs but total downtime costs—which would assist in making equipment replacement decisions.

Maybe you have more equipment than you need because there is too much downtime.  Or you need to correlate the age of equipment to maintenance expense.  With the right data, you can personalize the reports to provide the insight you are looking for.  If you maintain a system that simply reports what you’ve spent, all you know is what you’ve spent.  Besides what I’ve already mentioned, have you considered;

• Did you recover all of the warranty possible?
• How much of your expense was due to damage?
• Do you have the right equipment for the job?
• What’s the usage of each piece?
• Are there certain components that consistently fail?

This is just a basic list.  I’ve used relational database programming to accumulate the data into usable reports.  We analyzed fleets as small as 20 units to nationwide fleets of 1700 units.  With the right tools (software) and industry knowledge Fleet Management will assist any owner making the right factual decision for their operation.

What’s important to you regarding Fleet Management?