A survey indicates forklift users have high interest in environmental sustainability and energy efficiency factors in making purchase decisions.

The findings stem from Crown's 20-question email survey of about 600 forklift users.

"Our customers are interested in new and innovative ways to minimise waste, manage energy and maximise productivity," says Matt Logan, director of global marketing. Of the respondents, 83% indicated that environmental sustainability is important when making forklift purchasing decisions. A video on the Crown website underscores the company's commitment to sustainability.

About 95% of respondents note the importance of energy efficiency in making purchasing decisions.

Respondents showed interest in emerging technologies such as fuel cells and fleet management. About 35% believe that fuel cells will be important to material handling in the next five years while 37% use some form of fleet management software now. About 65% of those with fleet management software use spreadsheets as a management tool.

"Spreadsheets can be very useful in managing and analysing fleet costs, but they can't provide the real-time visibility required to optimise productivity," says Jim Gaskell, Crown director of global Insite-brand products. "We believe fleet management systems used on truck-mounted devices that provide real-time visibility into truck and operator location, energy usage, impacts and other variables represents one of the best opportunities material handling managers have to increase productivity."

In the wake of challenging times over three years, 51% increased fleet size, and less than 10% reduced fleet units. Looking to the future, 47% expect fleet size to grow during the next three years while 50% anticipate the same-size fleet. The remaining respondents expect to operate smaller fleets.

The New Bremen-based forklift manufacturer conducted the proprietary forklift user survey during August and disclosed the results on 15 November. The effort was Crown's first such survey.

Crown's global Insite-brand information management products include the InfoLink wireless fleet and operator management system, Crown FleetStats tracking and analysis of fleet service data, the Crown Access 1 2 3 collection of forklift operating data in support of InfoLink and the Crown SureSpec forklift specification tool.