Material Handling Equipment Fleet Sizing: Forklift Cycle Times, Moves per Hour, Truck Counts, Battery Shifts & Rent vs Buy

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the daily pallet flows of a fictional distribution centre into truck moves by activity, spread them over a 16-hour day and find the peak hour the fleet must cover.
• Build the cycle time of five move types from distance, loaded and empty planning speeds, lift and handling times, convert it into cycles per hour and find the move-weighted average cycle.
• Convert moves and cycle times into truck hours for the early and late shift, work out the truck hours the peak hour needs and split the hours by truck type.
• Turn an 8-hour shift into the hours a truck really works: minus breaks, handover and checks, battery changes and planned maintenance, times an efficiency factor – and you add up a truck's effective hours per week.
• Size the fleet of three truck types: trucks for each shift, trucks for the peak hour, the largest of these needs and the total fleet with fictional spares.
• Work out how often each truck type needs a charge, how many batteries a swap system needs, how many charger slots the site must provide and whether opportunity charging in breaks could replace a battery change.
• Lay out five years of cash flows for buying and for renting one truck, discount them with NPV, compare the present values and work out the cost per move of the cheaper option.
• Compare the hour-meter readings of eleven trucks with their available hours, pool the utilisation per type, count the under-used trucks and chart used against available hours.