Dear Solutions,

It seems that you may be missing a point about maximising warehouse storage space by use of appropriate forklifts and that you may be unaware of the revolution going on with articulated (pivot steer) forklifts. These trucks, like the Bendi, Flexi and Aisle Master, can match any reach truck on lift height, i.e. up to 13 mt, but surpass them on aisle width needs. A Bendi, for example, can work safely in aisles only 1.6 mt wide compared with the typical 2.6 mt needed by any reach trucks and they can be fitted with double deep pantograph attachments.

Unlike VNA (very narrow aisle) trucks they do not need any form of rail or wire guidance and are much faster and more flexible, being able to work outside on rough ground. This means that they are very much cheaper to buy and run than dedicated VNA trucks. Their only limitation until now was that they did not offer man up capability. This has now been rectified by the recent British launch of an articulated man up Bendi.

The point to bear in mind with any warehouse project cost justification is not to consider only the densest storage acheivable but also the pallet productivity of the trucks in terms of pallets moved per hour. In this respect, articulated forklifts, owing to their greater versatility, are usually far more productive than reach and VNA trucks, which cannot work outside, as a rule, and need more space for manoeuvring at aisle ends.