BY TOBY GOOLEY, SENIOR EDITOR
INDUSTRIAL TRUCK FLEET MANAGEMENT
T WO YEARS AGO, DC VELOCITY PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE TITLED “COULD
a lift truck become the ‘brain’ of your DC operation?” In it, Crown Equipment
Corp.’s Jim Gaskell, who oversees the forklift maker’s fleet optimization
products, posited that lift trucks would one day function as mobile data hubs,
connecting to systems and devices beyond warehouse management systems
(WMS). It could soon be possible, he said, to use the resulting data to better
manage the warehouse as a whole.
That day has arrived.
Lift truck telematics—the transmission of data to and from industrial
trucks—and the technologies used for collecting, sharing, and analyzing lift
truck-related data have made great strides since that article was published.
These developments have enabled the once-humble forklift to become a full-
fledged member of the Internet of Things (IoT), which the McKinsey Global
Institute defines as devices that can “monitor their environment, report their
status, receive instructions, and even take action based on the information they
receive.”
With the right technology on board, lift trucks can do all that and more,
opening the way for them to function as the data hubs envisioned several years
ago. But it doesn’t end there. Engineers and software developers are thinking
strategicinsight
Lift truck data:
The next frontier
New developments
in wireless
communication and
data collection will
soon allow
industrial fleets
to go where
no forklift has
gone before.
