You purchase or lease them. They move your product. In fact, nothing heavy moves without them. You count on them to be working but how can you really know what they do each and every minute?

Believe it or not, today’s forklifts are highly intelligent and capable of telling stories. By recording all of their movements and interactions with the operator, the smart truck electronics have a built-in industrial engineer that knows everything by date/time stamping each action.

By transmitting that data to the appropriate software application, today’s sophisticated telematics solutions provide management with information that can improve efficiency, productivity and safety.

Today, most companies spend much effort putting initiatives in place to try and solicit feedback from their employees. Whether it’s a Six Sigma lean initiative, Toyota Production System, or just a suggestion box, managers need feedback.

Let’s look at how you can gather feedback from your material handling equipment like never before. What if you looked at your material handling equipment more like employees rather than assets? What if this new employee faithfully reported every moment of every day with the specifics of what they’re doing? How helpful would that be for productive coaching? Things like:

• who logged on to access the equipment and how much of the logged in time was actually spent doing something, when they stepped on/off the deadman, and how much they lifted and traveled during the day;
• daily checklist pass/fails and whether any issues need to be or have been addressed- all stored electronically for easy access;
• impact alerts notifying you immediately of anything noteworthy via text or e-mail; and
• fault codes, time of day, and operator on the truck at the time.

This information, especially when automatically gathered, organized, filed and reported, is a great benefit that leads to action and improvements. After all, these trucks tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!

Raymond would like to introduce the EVO, the next evolution in telematics. What are your lift trucks doing? How efficiently are they performing? Is there a better solution to your warehouse needs? Now you can know for sure.

Please contact me for more information on how to hear the stories your forklifts have to tell.