How Do You Know When to Repair or Replace?

It was a topic of conversation in Crown’s marketing department just this week. One of our colleagues needed service on their vehicle, and each time service was performed, it uncovered another issue that potentially required attention.

Many of us have dealt with this issue when the vehicle we are driving began to need more frequent maintenance to keep it in dependable working order. Eventually, we become so aware of the cost of repairs that we start to question whether we should just consider replacing the vehicle.

Now put yourself in the place of the warehouse or forklift fleet manager. What if you had 7,000 vehicles, distributed across multiple locations, and each of them required some level of maintenance every year? Now you’re looking at thousands of service calls across the entire fleet, making it nearly impossible to associate specific repairs with individual forklifts.

Every time a forklift unexpectedly needs service, it becomes a guessing game. When was it last serviced? How frequently is it being serviced? How much have we spent to service this unit just to keep it operational? Answering these questions requires research, which in turn requires time and more importantly, that time is now downtime for what may be a critical piece of equipment.

There is a solution that can track this data and reduce the time required to make a repair or replace decision, and it can be just as valuable for a small forklift fleet as it can for someone managing a fleet of 7,000 lift trucks. It’s Crown’s FleetSTATS Fleet Maintenance Management System, which provides a simple and efficient way to capture and analyze the total forklift maintenance cost of individual lift trucks and entire fleets, whether they’re located in one facility or distributed across multiple locations.

The FleetSTATS system not only provides a way to streamline the processing and approval of individual forklift service transactions, but it also captures the detail associated with each repair and assigns it to a specific unit that was repaired. When a service or repair need is identified, it can help you quickly and easily determine how frequently you have serviced a unit and how much you have spent to do so.

More importantly, though, the FleetSTATS system can help you proactively make repair or replace decisions in advance, before a problem resulting in downtime occurs. It provides the data you need to make informed decisions about each forklift in your fleet before unexpected downtime occurs. In fact, many FleetSTATS system users are using its data to identify and replace worn equipment before it creates productivity issues, and these decisions can be made without the stress of downtime that directly affects throughput.

You can learn more about how DHL Supply Chain uses the FleetSTATS system to manage its forklift fleet proactively. While its fleet is large and complex, it is easy to see how a solution like the FleetSTATS system could be helpful, even for those of us trying to figure out if we should make just one more repair to our beloved vehicle.