Atlas Blog

The right equipment is necessary to keep your business moving forward, but without the right operators, your investment in equipment will be wasted capital. That’s why Atlas Toyota Material Handling provides specialized and comprehensive training materials and programs. Why? Because training is not just important, it’s mandatory.

No matter how well-equipped you are, at some point you’ll be in the market for a forklift replacement. When the time comes, whether you’re buying new or used, you’ll want to make sure you’re purchasing the right forklift to meet your needs. Do your homework before you ever visit the dealer, and ask yourself these questions.

According to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), a standard forklift capacity plate is a nameplate that contains the capacity of the lift truck, where the capacity is defined as “the manufacturer’s guideline for how much weight a forklift can safely lift.”¹ The nameplate contains a host of information besides the forklift’s capacity data.

Operating forklifts have costs associated with them. While you might not think it worth your time to track these costs, this is never beneficial. First off, knowing the average forklift cost per hour is a good indicator to use to determine when to replace them with new lift trucks. Second, these costs will help you identify potential problems with particular lifts. For instance, you could have one forklift that is constantly breaking down even though it is a year or two old.

Order pickers are a type of lift truck that are used in warehouses to fulfill customers’ orders for products. Rather than use a forklift to pull the entire pallet of goods off of shelves, the order picker raises and lowers employees to the appropriate height to manually pull the desired quantity.