It Still Takes Brains to Maintain

Anyone shopping the lift truck market for the first time in a few years might be surprised by some of the new technology. The biggest shock might be how communicative the latest models are. With telemetry devices using Wi-Fi, RF or cellular transmission, lift trucks can be linked into maintenance tracking software and fault codes can trigger work schedule revisions automatically.

If a buyer didn’t know any better, they’d think lift truck maintenance had become a no brainer. Don’t tell that to Bill Collins, general manager at Railex. Railex markets itself as a distribution platform made up of 55-car refrigerated trains that ship the equivalent of 220 truckloads of refrigerated goods from West Coast to East Coast every week, in both directions. Collins manages a fleet of 40 Toyota lift trucks at Railex’s Schenectady, NY, warehouse, and they run all-out to unload these trains at a rate of 12,000 pieces an hour. That’s an entire train of products in less than a day—and there are four trains a week. Making sure these lift trucks keep operating requires not only brains, but discipline.

Collins’ maintenance crew services these lift trucks in the off hours. Their diligence ensures that very few of them ever require unscheduled emergency repairs. In fact most of the maintenance discipline is tied to simple good housekeeping.

“Most of our issues are load wheels, axles and bearings,” Collins says. “And most of that is just keeping our facility clean to keep the debris out of the bearings and the wheels. That’s where we get our most direct savings. We always stress, pick it up instead of run it over. We have an in-house video channel showing some of maintenance’s most difficult repairs. We put it on in the lunchroom so people can see what happens when they don’t do a good job cleaning up. That money comes off the bottom line.”

This facility’s maintenance department consists of five people supported by Summit Handling Systems, Inc., the authorized Toyota dealer based in Long Island. Why not leave all his maintenance to Summit?

“Every facility that has this many pieces of equipment should be able to press on its own tires and make its own hydraulic fittings and hoses and have them on the shelf,” he explains. "That goes a long way to keeping costs down.”

That commitment to upkeep impresses Paul Weymann, vice president of Summit Handling Systems.

“We initially held a 'train-the-trainer' program for Railex and they in turn have very good driver training,” he says. “Preventive maintenance is a must there, and they don’t let them slip. They were concerned about run time, because when trains come in, two men empty them and turn them around. They were concerned with the batteries, but the AC functionality on the rider trucks really helped improve their run time.”

A Tool, Not a Crutch

Although Railex depends on its operators, maintenance crew and dealer to handle any problems that come along, technology is evolving to where the cost of diagnostics will come down and the capabilities will come up, resulting in an ROI that many fleet managers may find easier to justify.

“Depending on fleet size, the return on investment from these devices can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year,” maintains Theo Rennenberg, fleet service manager for Modern Group LTD, a Hyster dealer serving Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. “Some of the newer web-linked devices can also relay diagnostic information back to service providers, thereby increasing the first-pass completion rates on repairs which will equal higher productivity.”

Nevertheless, the electronics in a lift truck only represent a fourth of the maintenance equation, according to Jim Gaskell, director of customer support at Crown Equipment. “People get excited about what the electronics is doing and how it’s detecting problems, but ten years ago the electronic portion of the truck used to represent a third of the maintenance expense. The reason it’s going down even though the customer’s utilization of the product is going up is because there’s been a significant move from contactors and moving parts to solid state componentry and better reliability.”

The point is, if you rely on the electronics and technology to handle maintenance, you may miss critical wear and tear issues involving components like load wheels.

“There isn’t a technology that helps you predict those things, so people still have to do planned maintenance and stay up on the equipment,” Gaskell says.

The Dealer’s Challenge

Good maintenance people know the importance of schedule discipline, but economic downturns tend to take a toll on good maintenance, and the recent recession was no exception. Tim Hilton is seeing the consequences now, as the economy improves and business picks up for his customers. Hilton is CEO of Carolina Handling, a Raymond lift truck dealer serving North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. He believes the overall condition of equipment worsened during the downturn, and this will put pressure on dealers to prove they’re up to the task of helping customers bring their fleets back to life. It’s a different business climate now.