The Material Handling Blog

When your leased materials handling equipment reaches the end of its contract, it’s often difficult to decide what your next steps should be. Is it best to invest in new equipment that you haven’t used before, or should you just extend the contracts of the trucks you already have on site?

The correct answer will depend completely on the needs and requirements of your operation. But in many situations, bringing on new equipment can often be the best decision in the long run, once you consider the benefits that technological advances can bring.

Even if a forklift is developed to be as safe and ergonomic as possible, it can still be a dangerous tool if not used correctly. Almost all businesses that deal with materials handling will have a safety policy, but a busy, fast-moving warehouse will always be an environment where safety is highly important.

Fortunately, warehouse work can be made much safer when some basic rules are followed closely, and potentially risky practices are completely avoided. This list is a long one, but here are a few basic rules which are important to remember in your daily work.

Sometimes, only the smallest change is needed to make a big difference to your materials handling operation — especially when it affects such a time-consuming operation as order picking (which is also the most expensive process in the handling chain).

For order pickers who spend their working days walking along aisles, removing items from the racking and placing them onto pallets on their trucks, an additional feature as minor as rising forks could have huge benefits — both to their health, and also to their efficiency and productivity.

If the surface you step on to get into your forklift is well-designed, you probably won't even notice it at all. But a lack of care from the manufacturer when it comes to this small detail adds to the strain that drivers experience on the job, which will ultimately affect your operation and increase costs.

Generally speaking, the step-in height on a forklift should be as low as possible. This means that it takes less effort for the driver to climb on or off the truck during a busy shift.

When the time to purchase new forklifts comes, the focus is always on costs. This makes sense — no-one in business would want to spend money unneccessarily, and if a machine can do the job, then the lower the cost, the better.

Costs will always be an important factor. But which ones? When thinking about the money you're going to spend on your forklift over its lifetime, you'll only make the best decision if you consider your hard and soft costs.

Everyone could easily lift a package weighing a few kilograms, but what if you had to pick that same package hundreds of times a day, over the course of weeks and months, possibly from hard-to-reach places? You’d probably start feeling the strain quite quickly, and you’d end up hoping you had some equipment or solution to make the job easier.

This is what order pickers do, but unfortunately the strain and injury that can occur in this job over long periods is still not as well-known as it could be.

Operating a forklift is a demanding job, and the stresses of a busy materials handling operation can put strain on drivers. This doesn't only make them uncomfortable and prone to injury, but also makes them less efficient and productive, harming the operation's bottom line.

Fortunately, the physical challenges of logistics work can be made much easier with the help of ergonomic design — not only does it make the job much safer and more comfortable for drivers, but also increases overall productivity. Let's take a look at the main causes of strain and injury in the warehouse, and how they can be mitigated with ergonomics.

Forklifts have existed for over 100 years — but it's only in more recent decades that ergonomic design has become a important question for manufacturers to answer.

That's unsurprising when you consider that today, the biggest cost you'll have to pay over your truck's lifetime isn't the service, or the financing costs — it's the cost of the driver. Therefore, making sure that they can do their jobs safely and efficiently is essential if you want to stay financially competitive.

But what does a truly ergonomic truck look like? Plenty of forklifts on the market claim to be ergonomically designed, but features such as these examples really make sense from an ergonomic perspective.

As you know, forklift drivers come in all shapes and sizes, and a cabin that feels good and fits perfectly for one operator may be completely wrong for another.

It’s obvious that comfort plays a huge part in ensuring safety and keeping productivity high. So why shouldn’t you treat this as a priority? Especially when you consider that the driver takes up the majority of a truck’s total cost of operation.