For much of their history, lift trucks were managed and maintained in-house, with minimal post-sale assistance from dealers. Now that many lift truck users have entered into maintenance agreements with dealers, equipment users no longer have to oversee the minutiae of fleet maintenance. By the same token, dealers and service providers are now challenged to efficiently manage services and parts supplies to ensure the uptime their clients demand.

As original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) develop fleet management solutions, dealers and service providers also leverage many of the same technologies, reporting metrics and inventory management tools.

Your forklift fleet and other powered industrial trucks are the workhorses of material handling operations and managing them effectively has its challenges. Forklift accidents are the second leading cause of fatalities in the private sector (highway vehicles being the first) according to OSHA. Also, operator labor represents the largest single cost component of material handling operations and a fleet of industrial vehicles is very expensive to acquire and maintain. A forklift vehicle management system can help control these and other safety, productivity and damage issues that are so common in fleets.

The fundamental starting place is vehicle access control, or restricting who can operate your trucks. Since it's impossible for your industrial vehicle operators to keep dozens of keys in their pockets, inevitably keys are always left in trucks' ignitions. That means anyone can operate the trucks at any time with little, if any, accountability

You can be forgiven if you've never said Snorlax and supply chain - or Mewtwo and manufacturing - in the same sentence. While the stunningly successful Nintendo game, Pok�mon Go, might have your kids running all over the neighborhood capturing those friendly monsters, it might be hard to imagine what place it could have in the supply chain!