Save 15% in 15 Minutes?

April 14th, 2020 - Winning the War on Maintenance Costs

While a longtime fan of the GIECO gecko commercials, it’s not likely that we can easily make that kind of commitment. Just to be clear, the 15% savings is not the problem, it’s the timeline. The reality for most is that we can save 15% and possibly more with one of the Lift Truck Center managed maintenance programs.

The initial hurdle for most companies is establishing an accurate baseline of current operating costs per unit. After all, if you don’t know what you’re spending now, how do you know if a new program or service provider is delivering cost saving results. What items do you want included in that baseline? Do you want to include planned maintenance expense, tire replacements, and avoidable damage repairs? With some discussion, an equipment list and extensive site survey, this baseline is something that we can help you identify.

The site survey results that lead to direct cost savings opportunities might surprise you since they often look something like this:

• You might be operating too many lift trucks and can get by with fewer, more reliable units (this might be purchasing a good used truck instead of new), or changing your battery charging to opportunity or fast charging.
• Some of your existing lift trucks can be cost effectively redeployed within your operation in less demanding areas.
• The lift trucks that are costing you the most to operate can often be replaced with less expensive units (do you need to spend $35-40K on a reach type forklift when horizontal shuttle of pallets is the primary function), or provide you better operating efficiencies by reducing the number of pallet touches (i.e. dock to stock), or enable you to add storage capacity without expanding the footprint of your existing building.
• Areas within your operation are often identified that are causing expensive repairs on your lift trucks (i.e. poor floor conditions, improper type of dock levelers often result in frequent tire and wheel replacement, aisles that are too tight to comfortably operate within that are resulting in costly rack and lift truck damage).
• Or its possible that your operator fondly known as “Hurricane Henry”, needs additional operator training or the performance parameters reduced on his assigned equipment (i.e. top travel speeds or acceleration rates).

As lift truck and material handling professionals we are here to help you identify solutions that reduce your administration of managing your equipment fleet, and level out your monthly operating expenses for ease of budgeting.

We can begin the process now while being respectful of activities that temporarily need to be deferred until we are able to schedule an onsite evaluation. Please contact us via phone or email to learn more.