THE ONETRACK GUIDE TO FORKLIFT SAFETY
Capture ROI from Your Forklift Safety Program
How do you quantify the ROI of a safer warehouse?
Investing in a video-based forklift safety program isn’t just about making sure your operators clock out in the same condition they came to work in — it’s also a great way to save money. From reducing forklift accidents costs to avoiding false workers comp claims, read on to learn how to measure the value of your forklift safety program.
Results from OneTrack customers
15%+
lower labor cost per unit
75%+
lower OSHA TIR
56%+
fewer product damages
IN THIS CHAPTER
01. Reduce forklift accidents: Decrease the frequency and severity of forklift impacts in your warehouses
02. Decrease unplanned maintenance: Minimize wear and tear to extend the life of your MHE fleet
03. Avoid false workers comp claims: Use video evidence to upgrade safety investigations and avoid unnecessary payouts
04. Retain and upskill operators: Foster a safety culture to improve morale, reduce turnover, and upskill forklift operators
05. Optimize labor costs: Unlock productivity gains through idle time alerts, less MHE downtime, and reduce indirect time
Part 1 — Reduce Forklift Accidents
Decrease the frequency and severity of forklift impacts
Probably the most important benefit that can come from a successful video-based forklift safety program is a decrease in forklift accidents in your warehouses. While it’s tough to say “all forklift impacts = $X”, there are a few things to look at in terms of ROI.
How does a successful forklift safety program reduce accidents?
The best forklift safety programs combine two key things: Video based coaching and actionable data. Together, they give you the deep visibility that you need to coach operator behavior, improve safety processes, and reduce forklift accidents in your warehouses.
OneTrack customers see a 77% decrease (on average) in forklift impacts after implementing a forklift camera system and coaching their operators.
Plus as you continue to coach on the leading indicators in your building, you will proactively get ahead of incidents and should see dramatic improvements over time.
Want to see for yourself how OneTrack works? Check out this interactive product tour.
When and how to measure ROI
Across the board, OneTrack customers see a dramatic drop in forklift impacts within 3-6 months of going live. As you continue to consistently coach operators, you’ll see a noticeable drop in both frequency and severity on forklift accidents.
If you aren’t using a system with built in analytics like OneTrack, we recommend keeping a tally of impacts in a spreadsheet, both before and after you go live with a system. This way you can calculate the percent drop in the number of accidents and associated costs.
If you’re a OneTrack user, you can take a look at your safety dashboards to see your impact trends at a specific site or across your network. It’s also a good idea to take a look at soft impacts, aggressive driving, and product hits as well to get an overall picture. Of course, with less serious accidents you’ll get less accident related costs.
Key performance indicators
Decrease in forklift impacts
Decrease in accident related costs
Decrease in overall safety events
Decrease in product damage
Decrease in "critical" events
Part 2 — Decrease Unplanned Maintenance
Minimize wear and tear and extend the life of your MHE fleet
It’s not just the serious impacts that can impact your bottom line, it’s also the small impacts, bumps, and scratches. This wear and tear adds up over time and can be a “budget buster” when it comes to maintenance above and beyond your plan.
How a successful forklift safety program reduces unplanned maintenance costs
Luckily, with a forklift camera system you can coach operators and start eliminating these smaller safety events and extend the life of your MHE.
Behaviors like not looking before reversing and bumping racking, unsafe dock plate maneuvers (can damage your tires), and small hits to other MHE can add up to cost a fortune in maintenance expenses.
But by getting real-time alerts of these behaviors, your supervisor team can have coaching conversations with minutes of these events happening. And while these don’t require formal corrective action, that increased accountability will start to work it’s way into the culture of your warehouses.
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When and how to measure ROI
Long story short, with a good forklift safety system and program, you’ll see an almost immediate reduction in things like phone use, not looking in the direction of travel, and small impacts. However, you should wait at least a few months before pulling maintenance cost data to get a good picture of your savings.
Most logistics leaders track their overall maintenance budget in a spreadsheet and then keep track of any unplanned expenses. Keep an eye on that change over time while also documenting the change in unsafe behaviors.
With OneTrack, it's simple to keep track of your safety trends. You can easily see how that change is affecting your maintenance costs. You may even be able to push out fleet replacements by months (or years!) which can mean massive savings.
Key performance indicators
Extended fleet replacements and lease extensions
Reduction in unplanned maintenance spend
Decrease in "leading indicator behavior
Decrease in rack damage
Part 3 — Avoid False Workers Comp Claims
Use video evidence to upgrade safety investigations and avoid unnecessary payouts
Death, taxes, and workers comp claims. An unfortunate reality, no matter how good your forklift safety program is, accidents will inevitably happen. And with that, comes the risk of paying out false claims.
How forklift camera systems can reduce false claim payouts
The good thing about workers comp claims is that you don’t actually make the decision to deny or pay. All you do is conduct an investigation and provide evidence.
Traditionally when a workers comp claim comes in, you’d start by interviewing employees who may have been in the area, and potentially watching back through your CCTV footage to try and get a view of what happened. Unfortunately, CCTV doesn’t always catch everything, isn’t always a great viewpoint, and is always a time consuming, manual process.
With a forklift camera system, like OneTrack, it streamlines this process in two key ways. For starters, you’ll likely have gotten an alert of the safety event if it really happened, eliminating the need to go hunt through CCTV. Second, you can actually request footage during a certain timeframe to get extra viewpoints if you think a piece of MHE was in the area.
This collection of video evidence is concrete, (mostly) automated, and has saved our customers hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary payouts.
When and how to measure ROI
It’s hard to put a timeframe on this. Some years you may have 0 claims to contend with. Other years you could deal with multiple.
Doing this on a case by case basis makes the most sense. After a claim comes through that turns out to be false, make sure to follow up and take note of the potential payout if the decision went the other way.
Keep a running list of these amounts, and during your quarterly — or yearly — safety reports, be sure to include that hard dollar figure as savings associated with your forklift camera investment.
Key performance indicators
Dollars saved on false payouts
Decrease in number of false claim payouts
Part 4 — Retain and Upskill Operators
Foster a safety culture to improve morale, reduce turnover, and upskill forklift operators
Any other logistics leaders feel like they’re constantly battling turnover in your warehouses? You aren’t alone. We’ve heard stories on hiring a warehouse worker and then by lunch time that person is already gone. And with it costing 25% of an operators salary to replace them, turnover costs can get out of hand quickly.
How a successful forklift safety program increase retention?
It might sound counterintuitive at first, given the initial operator push back to forklift cameras, but these safety systems actually help to decrease operator turnover, improve onboarding efforts, and upskill your existing operators over time.
It may take a few months, but eventually your operators will understand that the forklift camera system is there to help keep them safe. All it takes is consistent communication and coaching and they’ll buy-in to the process. Plus, when you bring in new operators, that’s all they know, so it makes for smooth onboarding. That kind of culture change helps to attract talent, retain your top operators, and through consistent coaching, you’ll see a noticeable increase in operator performance.
When and how to measure ROI
With the labor shortage seemingly a part of every headline these days, keeping track of operator retention is critical. It’s best to wait until 3-6 months after you’ve introduced a forklift camera system to your safety program to give operators a chance to get used to the system and buy-in. It’s also a good idea to collaborate with your peers in HR to keep a pulse on turnover costs and recruitment savings.
Key performance indicators
Dollars saved on recruitment and replacement
Decrease in operator turnover
Increased onboarding speed
Part 5 — Optimize Labor Costs
Increase productivity through idle-time alerts, less MHE downtime, and AI-labor management
Almost every logistics leader we talk to mentions they plan to reduce costs, and a major piece of that plan is to optimize their labor costs. But how do you actually do that and how does it tie into your forklift safety program?
How your forklift camera system can help optimize labor costs
This is where things get really interesting. Keeping people safe is priority number 1 for every logistics leader, but once you get a good handle on your forklift safety program there are a lot of benefits that a forklift camera system can bring you.
For example, with OneTrack we offer an entire AI labor management suite that helps you track forklift idle time, gap times around shift changes, and around long running lunches or breaks.
It can also integrate with your WMS to combine timestamp data with video evidence so you can actually see why certain processes or picks are taking longer and make improvements instead of having to hunt through an excel sheet.
When and how to measure ROI
Typically our customers start with safety. It’s the easiest thing to influence right away. But after about 6-12 months of using the system, they start to use other functionality.
The great thing about OneTrack is that all features are included in your subscription, no upsells. It’s just a matter of when you decide to use it all.
We’ve built out productivity dashboards that will show you how much time you might be losing to gap time, idle time, indirect time and poor processes and what the labor spend is related to that so you can easily show and report on success.
Key performance indicators
Decrease in indirect labor spend
Decrease in forklift idle time
Decrease in "lost time"
Make forklift safety a priority with OneTrack
OneTrack's AI Forklift cameras and safety tools give logistics leaders the visibility they need to help reduce forklift accidents, improve operator behavior, and lower costs. Explore how our Warehouse Intelligence platform can help you improve safety and drive ROI.
AI Forklift Cameras
Protect your warehouses and keep people safe with AI forklift cameras that monitor MHE for risks 24/7 and send real-time video alerts to help keep operations running smoothly.
Dynamic Labor Management
Engineered labor standards are broken. Improve productivity in your warehouses by using AI to proactively alert you of risks, track your labor processes, and connect WMS timestamps with video context to make critical process improvements.
Proactive Operator Coaching
Coaching shouldn't ONLY happen after a major incident. Get alerts of the leading indicators of MHE safety incidents to coach operator behavior proactively and change the culture in your warehouses.
