Owning and managing a fleet of forklifts isn’t easy. However, if you know how to manage them well and if they’re productive, your bottom line will be good. Smaller fleets are more manageable, but when fleet sizes increase, problems may arise. It may become increasingly difficult to make the most out of every forklift. Thankfully, there are ways you can lower forklift fleet costs. Continue reading to find the answers.
Table of Contents
1. Consider Hiring
Depending on your company or business, the typical way of doing things is building a fleet of forklifts, which makes sense. However, owning a forklift comes with maintenance and repair costs, among others. During ownership, you’ll have to invest in maintenance. However, there’s an alternative option: hiring instead of buying a forklift.
The advantage of a forklift hire Melbourne or any part of the world is that you get to have a high-quality, in-condition machine for a fraction of the price if you purchased one. Moreover, it won’t be your responsibility to service it, especially if the hiring company uses its drivers when operating the forklift. Plus, bear in mind that if you’re hiring, there’s no downtime on the machine since you’ll be using it only when you need to.
2. Reduce Fleet Size
The fact is that if you have a large fleet, there’s a very high likelihood that most forklifts would just lie idle for most of the time, meaning that most would suffer a lot of downtimes. This isn’t good for your business because that’s lost productivity. You can’t afford forklifts not working because they typically have high usage rates. If they don’t work, no money’s coming in.
If you find that you have more forklifts than you use and need, consider reducing the fleet size. That way, you’ll save on maintenance costs and increase the utilization of the forklifts.
3. Electric Forklifts
If you’re looking to save money, consider electric forklifts instead of using petroleum-powered ones. These have similar engines used in modern electric vehicles, too. Since they have fewer moving parts than combustion engines, these electric forklifts are easier to maintain. Plus, you save tons of money that would’ve otherwise bought fuel for your fleet.
Fuel costs are constantly rising, but, on the contrary, improvements in technology are just making electric forklifts much more affordable and easier to maintain. Moreover, these electric forklifts have little to no emissions, which is also great for the environment. So, if you haven’t already, consider replacing your diesel-powered forklifts with electric ones to save costs.
4. Reduce Damage
Sometimes, due to wear and tear, things break down. But, sometimes, if not most times, things can break because of human error or negligence. These things happen at the expense of the company. So, if you want to reduce the costs of managing your fleet, not only should it be well maintained, but you also need to place a great emphasis on accountability and safety.
The idea is to reduce damage occurrences to keep costs in check. For damage control, one could use things like impact sensors to keep track of any incident so that people are held to account. People will make sure to operate these forklifts carefully if you place the responsibility on them.
5. Reduce Labour Costs
To reduce labor costs, you may need to look for fleet management systems to help you manage your fleet more effectively. With using forklifts, it’s not always easy to account for idle hours worked by every forklift operator. So, you find that, sometimes, someone could get paid for a 10-hour shift, for example, when they probably only worked half of that time, or, maybe, the forklift was moving loads only two hours of that ten-hour shift.
Fleet management systems can overcome such hurdles by helping track the actual number of hours worked and the duration that the forklift has effectively worked. Then, you can work out labor costs more accurately based on actual hours worked. Besides that, you can tweak things, like the overtime pay rates, and restructure your incentive pay structures. Labor costs probably account for much of the expenses in any operation or project. So, if you can make the labor cost calculations more accurate, you can save some money.
Conclusion
With any fleet, managing the costs isn’t easy. Forklifts will be used to very different extents depending on the function, nature of the project, and, perhaps, the warehouse you use and the process flows. Ideally, you want to get the most out of your forklift at the lowest cost. But, striking that balance may not be easy.
That’s why you need to prioritize efficiency over everything. Where there’s efficiency, there are cost savings. Plus, don’t hesitate to cut your fleet down if you have more assets than you need. Instead, cash it into the business, and stay with what you need. Better yet, switch to renting forklifts instead of buying new ones. That way, you’ll enjoy great savings in the long run.
