3 Common Challenges for Handling Building Materials With Lift Trucks

20th April 2021

The construction materials supply chain is incredibly diverse. Yet whether you’re handling bricks, blocks, glass, precast, tiles, cement, aggregates, or any other building materials, your manufacturing or logistics operation is no doubt up against common challenges that require tough solutions.

Here are three of the most common challenges encountered in building materials applications using lift trucks, and how Hyster can help deal with them.

1. Tough environments

Building materials operations often require materials handling in rugged, dirty, and tough environments. Exposure to these difficult conditions typically pushes equipment to its limits. Dust and dirt can be challenges to the air filtration system and other components of a lift truck.

Hyster® lift trucks are designed for maximum reliability in industrial applications. For instance, the Hyster® Forte’s™ series features robust powertrain components, engineered for long life and reduced maintenance requirements, while the Hyster Stability Mechanism (HSM) enhances lateral stability for steady travel over uneven surfaces and minimised truck lean.

Hyster® electric forklifts, available as both three wheel and four wheel options, are also tough enough even for rugged building materials applications. What’s more, they eliminate exhaust emissions and improve air quality, have fewer moving parts, require less maintenance, produce less noise, and generate lower levels of heat, all of which help these trucks cope well in dusty environments.

common challenges

2. Awareness in the yard

Running safe operations in the yard is of key importance to operations flow and plant uptime, as is giving drivers and pedestrians good awareness around the yard, which may be cluttered and untidy.

Hyster® lift trucks are designed in their standard configuration to support operators and supervisors in their quest for operational safety, with features such as ergonomic cabs, all-round visibility, and responsive traction, steering, and braking systems.

To support customers in unique applications, Hyster offers special features enabling customers to configure Hyster trucks to meet application-specific requirements. Operator assistance features available on Hyster® lift trucks include pedestrian awareness lights, Load Overload System Sensors, and the Hyster Tracker telematics system.

Hyster Tracker limits truck access to trained operators only. It can track training updates, pre-shift inspections and provides impact monitoring, alerts, and incident data to support supervisors’ efforts to improve operator accountability and route optimisation around the yard.

common challenges

3. Valuable, varied loads

Building materials can vary significantly in size shape, weight, and material. Inefficient handling with a lift truck can lead to damaging valuable loads of building materials. This not only leads to slower operations but reduced profits, while also putting company reputation at risk.

The Hyster® Fortens™ series of forklifts can provide a balanced combination of versatility and performance, with a balance of reduced fuel consumption and greater power. This helps busy construction materials applications to move more loads but benefit from low maintenance and replacement part costs.

To support efficient handling of heavier and challenging loads, high capacity, heavy duty Hyster® forklifts are compatible with a wide range of specialist attachments that are quick and easy to change, supporting efficiency and damage avoidance.

common challenges

Hyster Tracker wireless asset management can also help drive overall fleet efficiency and identify under- and over-utilisation of trucks so the correct equipment is matched with the correct handling tasks. With fleet monitoring, it can also improve operator performance. Together this can help lower overall handling costs for construction materials applications.

What’s your challenge?

These are just a few of the Hyster® solutions for tough applications handling building materials. Contact our construction industry experts to discuss the challenges in your particular operation or consult your local Hyster® dealer for advice.

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