Pedriana says. Raymond’s Craver suggests giving serious
thought to retiring a truck when the average maintenance
cost per month approaches or exceeds the monthly payment for a new vehicle.
No matter what your criteria, you won’t be able to judge
when maintenance costs have become unacceptably high
without accurate, complete data, Schwieterman points out.
Fleet management systems are invaluable aids for collecting, tracking, and reporting that information, but small
fleets with just a few trucks could manually collect the necessary information and use a spreadsheet to sort it out.
BETTER PRODUCTIVITY
If a lift truck is becoming a drag on productivity, it’s prob-
ably time to replace it, Craver says. There are several reasons
that might happen: excessive downtime for repairs, inade-
quate ergonomics or outdated safety features, or the truck
simply wasn’t designed for its current (or future) job.
What to do with that tired old truck?
Suppose you’ve weighed all the evidence and decided
that it’s time to retire one or more of your lift trucks.
Now what? Here are a few suggestions:
▪ Reassign it. “In some circumstances, it can pay to
reassign a truck to a less demanding job,” says Bill
Pedriana, director of sales for Big Joe Forklifts. It will
cost more per hour to operate than a new one, but it
may still be cost-effective for applications or facilities
requiring fewer hours.
A successful redeployment requires that the truck
meet certain cost, safety, and reliability criteria. “If a
truck has hit the economic wall, I would not recommend
rotating it somewhere else, even if it’s to something
with low hours,” says Brian Markison, senior manager,
national accounts for UniCarriers Americas Corp. (
formerly Nissan Forklift Corp., North America and TCM
America). “There probably will be issues with it, and you
will still have to make a lot of repairs.”
▪ Keep it as a spare. When a truck has become too
expensive to operate on a regular basis but is still on a
depreciation schedule, it might make sense to keep it as
spare equipment—something every facility needs, says
Michael McKean, manager of fleet sales and marketing
for Toyota Material Handling U.S.A. Inc. (TMHU). For
instance, an older truck could fill in when a newer one is
down for maintenance.
If you regularly experience seasonal or short-term
spikes in volume, it may be more cost-effective to keep
a well-maintained “retired” truck on hand instead of
renting an extra one for those periods, says Pedriana.
And if you have a good-sized fleet, you might even
consider keeping an old forklift for spare parts, suggests
Scott Craver, product manager of business and informa-
tion solutions for The Raymond Corp. “There are times
when the parts might be worth more than the truck’s
resale value, plus you save time if you don’t have to wait
for next-day parts delivery,” he says.
