Forklifts need a proper preventive maintenance plan to ensure your company achieves its best bottom-line.
1. Consider The Circumstances
The first step in creating a forklift maintenance plan is to consider what should be inspected and how often. These considerations will help you create a plan of action for the future
- How old are your forklifts? – Older lifts often require more frequent maintenance.
- Have they been serviced appropriately in the past and is there a record of service? – This also helps in determining what the maintenance schedule should look like for a particular forklift.
- What are the safety requirements for your forklifts?– Safety checks and requirements should be built into your maintenance plan
- Is the machine susceptible to damage (like alignment issues)? – If so, you might want to consider adding extra checks to maintenance dates.
2. Create A Forklift Maintenance Schedule
Now you know what you’ve got to look out for, you can successfully begin to create a schedule for forklift maintenance. Preventive maintenance can save a company thousands per year. Consider the following questions while you’re piecing together the appropriate schedule.
- What type of Forklifts do you have? Internal Combustion, Propane, or Electric?
- What are the recommended preventive maintenance checks (refer to the list above)?
- Which tasks will you perform? Which tasks do you want to outsource?
- How often will these tasks need to be completed?
These checks are a great starting point for your preventive forklift maintenance plan. You can add or adjust the requirements on these checklists based on your collected knowledge of your company’s forklifts.
A Few Extra Tips For Saving Money With Forklift Maintenance
Some of the most valuable lessons learned in forklift maintenance come from personal experience. Below are a few of our experiences and best-practices.
- Make sure your operators know what they’re doing.Having well-trained operators is the best way to avoid expenses accrued from human error. on how to implement a training program.
- Use a modern Technology.A modern computerized maintenance management system like will help you run your forklift maintenance plan smoothly. mobile software helps you track work histories, track costs, process work orders, and much more.
- Change the tires regularly and watch for tire damage.Bad tires can cause accidents and add costs. Avoid unnecessary mishaps like five pallets of the product being knocked over because an operator’s tires were too worn to break-in time.
- Keep your facility clean. Make sure there’s plenty of space for trucks to get around and make sure there are rules and regulations in place for operating the trucks including right-of-way for multiple vehicles. Preventing accidents is the best way to avoid added costs and unexpected maintenance.
- Use qualified and licensed technicians.Because the person changing tires should be licensed to do that; the person repairing an LPG tank should be licensed to do so. What good is all the preventive planning if the repairs are crap?
- Make sure you can document an issue, tag it, get it to the repair shop, and ensure that it’s repaired efficiently. Streamlining will save everyone time, money, etc. If you’d like, you can implement a software program to do this for you. Our software can streamline the entire forklift maintenance process
- Finally, Forklift safety is an excellent way to keep your maintenance costs at bay. It’s clear that implementing daily inspection checks and long-term forklift maintenance plans will save your company both time and money, as well as from unexpected accidents!
