A worked example rather than a named client. It describes how a fleet examination programme is run on a distribution site, drawn from over 26 years of lifting equipment engineering experience.
Typical scope: a mixed fleet of 80 to 150 trucks on a site that does not stop.
A distribution operation running counterbalance trucks, reach trucks and powered pallet equipment has two problems at once. The first is that the site does not stop, so there is no natural window in which plant is standing idle. The second is that nobody is quite sure what the fleet consists of. Trucks arrive on short-term hire and stay, others go off for repair and come back with a different serial number, attachments get swapped between machines, and the asset register drifts away from reality within a year. An examination programme that works off the register rather than off the yard will miss plant that is in daily use.
The first cycle is as much an audit as an examination. Every truck in the yard is identified physically and reconciled against the register, including hired-in units, and anything that cannot be reconciled is listed rather than ignored. Thereafter the programme runs against a verified list on a six- and twelve-month split by machine type, worked in twilight and back-shift windows so the pick line keeps running.
What the operator ends up with is a verified asset list that matches the yard, one defensible record covering owned and hired plant, due dates split correctly by machine type, and enough data after two cycles to see which parts of the fleet are generating defects and which are not.
Why the first cycle always finds plant nobody knew about
On almost any fleet of this size the physical count and the asset register disagree, usually in both directions: machines on the register that left the site a year ago, and machines working the night shift that were never added. Hire units are the worst offenders, because a truck brought in for a peak period and retained quietly becomes permanent without ever entering the system. The duty to have the equipment examined follows control of it in use, not ownership, so making sure a hired truck working your pick line has a current examination is your responsibility, whoever arranges it.
The six- and twelve-month split within one fleet
A forklift truck is twelve-monthly. Fit it with a man-cage or a work platform and it becomes equipment for lifting persons at six months — and on a site with one or two trucks occasionally used for access to high racking, that distinction is routinely missed. Separately, the slings, chains and lifting accessories used around the operation carry their own six-month cycle regardless of what the trucks are on. A fleet of one hundred machines can therefore easily carry three different due dates, which is exactly why a single annual visit covering everything tends to leave something non-compliant.
Attachments, forks and the things that are not the truck
Clamps, rotators, extension forks and jibs change what the machine is and what it can safely lift, and they wear independently of the truck they are fitted to. Forks themselves are a routine finding: heel wear, blade distortion and cracking around the hanger are common on hard-worked fleets and are straightforward to assess once someone is looking. Capacity is the related trap — fitting an attachment derates the truck, and the data plate that reflects that is often missing or illegible long before the examination arrives.
Working around a site that does not stop
Examining a fleet on a live site is a logistics exercise. Trucks are taken in small batches so the pick line is never short, usually in the shift changeover or the quieter back-shift hours, with a marshalling area agreed in advance and the shift supervisor briefed on which machines go next. The alternative — asking for the fleet to be parked up for a day — is the request that gets examination programmes quietly deferred until they have lapsed.