The Material Handling Blog

As the COVID-19 crisis continues all over the world, materials handling professionals are focusing on how to make it through the crisis and ensure their businesses returns to full strength once things return to normal. 

Many businesses are operating at reduced capacity and with fewer resources, or even completely shut down. It's natural that at a time like this, investing in forklift training for operators might be low on the list of priorities.

But eventually the crisis will be over, and when things return to normal, many businesses will want to strengthen their operation for the future, increase their efficiency, and ensure that they can continue to perform well if similar crises happen in future. 

Many managers in materials handling operations would admit that their staff could benefit from training - even for experienced drivers, getting a refresher in the basics and learning more about laws and safety rules that affect drivers.

However, budgets can often be tight, and it's easy for training to drop down the list of priorities - especially when there are more pressing challenges to address in the operation.

This is understandable, but training shouldn't be seen as just another expense. In the long-run, having well-trained drivers with the right attitude can actually end up saving you significant amounts.

For some businesses, the amount of money spent on fixing damage to forklifts caused by poor or careless driving can be painfully high. These costs not only make the operation less efficient and eat up budget, they're also completely avoidable.

Maintenance costs will always be a fact of life, but it's possible to drastically reduce the costs of avoidable damage by investing in your operators.

Proper forklift training can achieve things that every warehouse manager wants – increased safety, better employee satisfaction and retention, and heightened productivity, amongst many other things. However, good training comes at a price, and involves taking time out of the working day, so there’s often people in an organization who refuse to prioritise it.