Why Your Forklift Fleet Needs a Power Study
A key part of any warehouse or material handling operation is ensuring that it is running as efficiently as possible. You need to get the most productivity out of your equipment as you can, while keeping operating and energy costs under control. That means you have to choose the best machines for your particular job, have the right number of machines, maximize battery life for electric equipment, and hold operators accountable for poor habits. A power study of your entire forklift fleet will provide the data you need to make the best decisions for your operation.
What is a forklift power study?
Conducting power studies is an important part of forklift maintenance and understanding your forklift batteries. They provide a comprehensive analysis of your machines’ power usage and how efficiently they are completing the job. A power study combines battery monitoring, data analytics, and insights from experts to give fleet managers recommendations and best practices for enhancing forklift performance and optimizing their use.
A forklift power study involves collecting data from your most used machines, looking at run times, idle hours, available charge hours, and the amount of amp hours being used every day. That information will tell you how much usage your batteries have, how much of that usage is productive work, and it will help you understand how long your forklift batteries will last. The study will also analyze how often you charge your batteries and how quickly they charge.
How you benefit from a power study
The reason why power studies are so critical for forklift maintenance and operation is that they provide key insights and recommendations for how you can improve machine use and optimize battery life. Here’s what a forklift power study can help you do:
Uncover waste – When we conduct a power study of your fleet, one of the main things we look at is where the most energy is being used. If we determine that an application is consuming more power than it should be, then we can dig into it deeper and find out why. Maybe there is some sort of interference in the process holding things up and leading to excessive idling. Or maybe certain operators are pushing loads on the ground instead of picking up and carrying the pallets. We’ll tell you where the waste is occurring and recommend strategies for eliminating it.
Size your machines and fleet correctly – Our power study will also check amp hours, or energy capacity, across your entire fleet to analyze how well your current machines get done what you need them to get done. For example, if you have a forklift that is struggling to maintain its charge for a shift, it may be that it’s under powered for your application and you need a larger, more powerful machine that can carry more and make fewer trips. It may also be that you need to add another forklift to your fleet to help share the load. We’ll make a specific recommendation for a solution based on what we see in the power study.
Improve charging practices – A power study can uncover opportunities to charge your forklift battery, particularly if you have lithium ion batteries or a fast charger for your lead acid batteries. If your operation has more downtime than you realized during a particular part of the day, then that time could be used to add energy back to your forklift batteries and extend how long they’re able to work each day before a conventional slow charge.
Determine if a lithium ion forklift battery is right for you – Many forklift owners are considering making the switch to lithium ion batteries. A power study will tell you if your operation is one that can significantly benefit from them or not. For example, if we find that idle time is high, power consumption is low, but your lead acid forklift batteries don’t last an entire shift, then lithium ion batteries may be a better option. The reason is that they charge quickly, so you can grab an opportunity to charge them by taking advantage of any idle time to charge the batteries, so they last the entire shift.
Plan for future costs – By looking at amp hour and run time hours, a power study will also help you predict how long your forklift battery will last, helping you plan for the added expense of a replacement.
At JIT, our power studies and the recommendations we make based on them will help you get the most from your forklift battery and improve the efficiency and productivity of your entire operation. If you’re interested in a power study or have questions about forklift batteries or forklift maintenance in general, contact the JIT team today!