ProMat 2025 delivered no shortage of innovative presentations, yet one technical session cut through the clutter by focusing on a single, everyday question: Which forklift battery will make or break my bottom line?

UgoWork’s presentation, “Lithium-ion battery showdown: Features, safety and value for your money,” centred on a material handling operations manager nicknamed Ted and followed his search for a forklift power solution that could keep pallets moving in a high-pressure cold-storage F&B warehouse.

Ted’s story became a lens through which the seminar unpacked the real-world stakes of switching from conventional lead-acid to lithium-ion technology—and of choosing the right lithium supplier in a market crowded with look-alikes.

A day in Ted’s warehouse

Ted runs a produce distribution centre in southern Texas, where every square foot of floor space carries a dollar value, and every minute of downtime translates into wilted produce and charge-backs from grocery chains. His headaches arrive in predictable waves: swelling SKU counts that squeeze aisles, battery-change stations that gobble up racking space, voltage sag halfway through a shift, and electricity bills that spike precisely when forklifts are busiest. Corporate sustainability targets add a fresh twist—carbon accounting, LCFS credits, and an expectation that every capital purchase chips away at emissions without undercutting productivity or safety.

Ted’s first instinct was to compare price tags on lead-acid and lithium battery packs for his lift trucks. Yet a quick spreadsheet simulation showed that up-front cost tells only half the story. At roughly 2,000 operating hours, which is barely a year for a two-shift fleet, the total cost of ownership (TCO) curves across. Watering stations, equalization cycles, battery swaps, additional chargers, and a spare-battery inventory swallow Lead-acid’s purchase discount. In contrast, lithium’s higher entry fee settles into a nearly linear expenditure that stays predictable as utilization intensifies. Ted’s finance team could live with that. His bigger worry was whether all lithium batteries were truly equal once the safety labels and spec sheets were peeled off.

Seeing past the cell chemistry

UgoWork’s seminar dismantled the assumption that “lithium-ion” is a single commodity. Any power solution features a battery and a charger, below which differentiation is limited. Above that baseline sit three domains that separate premium suppliers from opportunistic pack assemblers: safety engineering, service infrastructure, and applied expertise.

Safety maintenance managers can verify

Safety starts with third-party validation. A UL 2580 listing is more than a logo; it certifies that a complete battery pack has endured and survived a gauntlet of drop, crush, vibration, thermal, electrical and fire-containment tests. Responsible suppliers publish their full certificate numbers, which anyone can verify. Some go further, repeating the tests at greater severity, such as a two-meter drop instead of the one-metre UL minimum, to build in additional headroom for real-world abuse.

A second safety measure is OEM approval, in which forklift manufacturers run their own trials to confirm that a battery integrates cleanly with traction controllers, braking systems and safety interlocks. Without that approval, liability shifts to the customer if something shorts out during a peak shift.

Service that never leaves fleets idle

Service defines how quickly a battery problem ceases to be a problem. Fleets spread across North America need a battery partner who can dispatch certified local technicians within guaranteed response windows, clear tools and instructions, and a range of spare parts.

Opportunity charging invites high cycling rates; wireless updates let a battery vendor refine protections, adjust charge curves and flag misuse with minimal disruption. For Ted, a lithium-ion battery without over-the-air updates felt as risky as a diesel truck without a diagnostics port.

Expertise that translates data into dollars

Expertise ties the stack together. Telemetry is only useful when someone interprets it. Fleet managers benefit from customer-success specialists from the battery partner who turn amperage graphs into actionable advice on operator charging behaviour, each battery’s state of health, charging station placement, shift staggering, and utility-rate arbitrage.

The seminar showcased a state-of-charge simulator fed by actual duty-cycle data that tested whether a forklift battery could survive Ted’s refrigeration schedule without mid-shift top-ups. Once the simulation passed, a temporary data logger validated the forecast on the truck. The process spared Ted from basing a six-figure purchase on assumptions, rather than data-driven scenarios

Converting engineering into daily gains

Numbers anchored every claim. Sites that swapped from lead-acid to lithium in cold storage reduced electricity consumption by roughly 41%, thanks to higher round-trip efficiency. Retiring the battery-change room freed up floor space that was converted directly into revenue-earning racking. Maintenance hours decreased when operators no longer had to haul two-ton lead blocks on roller beds. Voltage stability across the discharge curve eliminated the mid-shift limp that once sent pallets back to staging to await a fresh truck.

Safety improvements were harder to monetize but impossible to ignore. A slow-motion thermal-runaway clip showed flames contained to a single cell inside a fortified enclosure. The scenario sparked discussion among attendees whose insurance premiums hinge on demonstrating multi-layer risk mitigation.

Another case study described a beverage warehouse that eliminated 9,000 annual battery-handling events, erasing a cluster of repetitive-strain injuries and reducing insurance claims and overtime.

Ted’s fleet re-right-sizing proved to be the most surprising gain. Lithium-ion’s sustained voltage meant each truck achieved more picks per charge, allowing the warehouse to reduce its overall forklift count without sacrificing throughput. Owning fewer trucks in an era of elevated interest rates freed up capital for high-density racking and automated pallet shuttles—assets directly tied to revenue, not merely to moving goods between zones.

The checklist that closed the deal

To formalize his decision, Ted turned to an evaluation tool shared during the seminar: a cloud-based spreadsheet in which each selection criterion can be weighted from “mandatory” to “nice-to-have.” 

He logged his priorities: UL listing, OEM approval, over-the-air updates, response-time service-level agreements, push notifications, energy-management support, and scored three shortlisted vendors. Two met the minimum safety levels but lacked depth in analytics and service coverage. The third ticked every box and offered a projected payback of 21 months, comfortably inside the company’s three-year threshold. Approval was swift, propelled as much by risk reduction and operational agility as by straightforward cost savings.

What the seminar means for other fleets

The session’s core argument was that battery procurement is no longer a hardware transaction; it is a strategic decision that touches facility layout, labour allocation, energy strategy and corporate sustainability goals. Forklift Action readers can begin by asking themselves three questions drawn from Ted’s story:

• Are recurring annoyances—voltage sag, manual swaps, corroded connectors—masking hidden costs? Treating them as normal may cost more than a fresh power strategy would.
• How much is my battery room worth in terms of racking, automation, or cross-dock throughput? Floor space is too expensive to dedicate to maintenance or battery storage that modern chemistry no longer requires.
• Would my current supplier guide a technology and service shift or merely ship new batteries like a box mover? The difference predicts how the next unplanned stoppage will unfold and how quickly it will be resolved.

Lithium-ion’s technical merits are largely settled; the competitive edge now lies in safety discipline, data-driven service, and the expertise to transform battery telemetry into business outcomes. As warehouses accelerate toward autonomous lift trucks and carbon-tracked logistics, batteries that can communicate with cloud-based energy systems and self-report their health in real time are becoming assets rather than consumables.

The seminar concluded with a simple image: fresh produce departing the field and arriving at a family table without delay. Batteries alone do not move bananas or strawberries, but the right battery eliminates the invisible friction that once separated harvest from shelf. For managers facing the same daily constraints as Ted—tight aisles, perishables, rising utility fees—the lesson is clear: the next competitive advantage might be hiding in plain sight, beneath the operator’s seat, waiting to be unlocked by the right blend of chemistry, software, and service.

Forklift Action readers who missed the live session can stream the recording or take a look at the evaluation template from UgoWork. The document isn’t a marketing brochure; it is a decision framework shaped by technicians and operations managers who have already turned theory into uptime. If your facility still plans shifts around battery swaps, Ted’s journey offers a blueprint for writing a more productive ending: this time with your own name in the header.

For additional insights, check out the related article on UgoWork’s blog.