The Material Handling Blog

Forklifts are durable machines, and they can stand still for long periods without creating too many problems. However, during the ongoing crisis, it's important to make sure that your equipment will be able to return to work quickly and smoothly once things return to normal.

A forklift's sticker price is an important figure, but it's often smaller than the much larger set of costs which arise over the truck's lifetime from things like service, driver costs and financing.

Creating an effective materials handling operation is hard, and it's even harder if you have to deal with different suppliers for your forklift trucks, fleet management solution, service and rental. Even with smaller fleets, juggling different suppliers can be tricky, and it means you have less time to deal with the most important thing — your operation.

You can have a fleet of the most technologically-advanced trucks on the market, but if you don't have a decent service partner to rely on, your operation will really suffer.

Cold stores, warehouses where frozen goods are stored, can reach temperatures as low as -35°C and are some of the most demanding environments that forklifts can operate in.

Fortunately, most forklift suppliers offer machines that are capable of working reliably in such cold temperatures. Freezing environments can make steel more brittle, make the oil and lubricants more viscous and reduce the truck's battery capacity, but adaptations can be made to forklifts to reduce the impact of these issues, ensuring both safety and reliability.

All trucks require maintenance sometimes, especially in high-intensity materials handling operations. The important thing is how quickly you can get the truck back in operation afterwards. This is where your service supplier's first visit fix rate becomes important.

Even after you've chosen, ordered and taken delivery of your new forklift truck, your relationship with the supplier isn't necessarily over. If you want that new truck to keep performing optimally throughout its lifetime, you're going to need regular service and maintenance.