Reducing Forklift Total Cost of Ownership with Fleet Management

Wondering what forklift fleet management is and how it can help your business? You’ve come to the right place. At The Lilly Company, we’ve helped companies just like yours optimize their forklift fleets for decades. Choosing the right fleet management solution partner can help reduce the total cost of ownership of your forklifts and other heavy equipment. Without this optimization, your business may be losing money that could be reinvested elsewhere.

What is Fleet Management?

Fleet management is a combination of maintenance, equipment acquisition, and operations. These different tasks combine to help reduce your total cost of ownership. Fleet management questions include:

• Whether your forklift fleet has enough or too many units?
• Can I change my type of equipment to better utilize my existing space and/or move materials and products more efficiently?
• Are your maintenance intervals properly spaced?
• Is your fleet made up of the right types of forklifts and other equipment?
• Are we adding new equipment too early or too late?
• Are my shifts using equipment equally?

A proper fleet management program will highlight areas for improvement in your forklift fleet operations by digging into these items. Many management programs rely on a telematics program to track granular usage and performance data. These technical points become essential for reducing your total cost of ownership.

How Does Fleet Management Reduce Forklift Costs?

By answering the questions laid out above, forklift fleet managers can work with their teammates in maintenance operations and finance to improve overall business performance. Some improvements made possible by a robust fleet management solution include: 

• Decreased downtime thanks to optimized maintenance intervals. By analyzing recorded maintenance against downed equipment and the cause of downtime, you can find the sweet spot that keeps your fleet up and running best for the price.
• Avoid the high cost of unused equipment. Equipment that isn’t running and moving product doesn’t make you money. By tracking usage hours and time actually moving loads, your telematics system can point to equipment that isn’t needed. Cutting your fleet frees up precious capital to invest in other improvements.
• Squeeze the most out of your investment. An improved equipment lifecycle thanks to cost per hour tracking. As equipment ages and logs higher working hours, it becomes more expensive to operate. By tracking these metrics and other essential information, you can identify the right time to replace equipment before your cost per hour jumps dramatically. 

A correctly implemented fleet management program will help reduce your total cost per hour across your fleets. Its benefits can extend beyond simple cost reduction, however.

What Are the Other Benefits of Fleet Management?

Beyond total cost of ownership, fleet management can help you make sure that your fleet is made up of the right equipment configurations. If you are buying more capacity than is needed, you can save money when obtaining new units with a lower capacity. Users can also reinforce their safety culture by implementing electronic safety checklists to enforce operator accountability and potentially avoid OSHA violations. Fleet management can even help track operator behaviors to track potential safety issues in need of retraining.

Want to see how a fleet management program can impact your business? Contact the Lilly Company today. We’ve been committed to excellence since 1919, and we stand by that tradition across the 13 locations we service. When you choose to do business with the Lilly Company, you’re gaining an expert business party that makes your success our priority. Trust us to help you get your forklift fleets fully optimized for business.

Contact us online or by phone 844-LILLYCO (1-844-545-5926) with any questions you have about new or used forklifts. Or come say hello at one of our locations.

Arkansas - Jonesboro

Alabama - Birmingham, Dothan, Irondale, Madison, Mobile, and Montgomery

Mississippi - Belden and Richland

Tennessee - Jackson, Kingsport, Knoxville, and Memphis

Further Reading:

Different Types of Forklifts - A Beginners’ Guide
When's the Best Time to Replace An Aging Forklift?
Forklift Battery Basics