How To Stop Forklifts Being Lifted! The Genius Of Geo-Fencing

Fleet managers and vehicle owners are always facing new challenges. And we, as suppliers of tracking equipment, have to move with them.

An important recent development has been the addition of 'geo-fencing' to our vehicle tracking equipment.

Geo-fencing very simply allows users to set the geographical parameters within which a vehicle or piece of equipment should be operating. On the one hand it can show that vehicles have reached designated delivery locations. On the other hand, it can reveal that a vehicle or piece of equipment has strayed out of a designated zone, ensuring the fleet manager knows about it immediately.

At iBox technology we've seen this technology applied in a variety of ways. In the haulage and logistics business, for instance, it allows transport companies to detect - and if necessary, prove - that a delivery has arrived at the correct destination.

One example of the usefulness of this came when a delivery firm was charged a heavy penalty by a major supermarket chain for not having delivered a consignment on time. After talking to its driver, the delivery firm challenged this. They argued that he had been on the supermarket's premises, but had been held back from emptying his load by the warehouse manager's decision to give another, later delivery priority because of its perishable load. They were able to prove the driver was on the premises by showing them the geo-fencing data which showed that the lorry had arrived ahead of rather than behind schedule. The penalty was refunded.

Another example came when we fitted geo-fencing to a fleet of forklifts being operated by a warehouse company on a large, industrial estate. They had suffered a series of disappearances of their forklifts. One or two had been stolen and subsequently recovered. But others had simply gone astray. Within a week of having our geo-fencing equipment fitted, the company had discovered the cause of these mysterious disappearances.

They found that workers were using the forklifts to travel around the estate, far from where they should have been working. The new geo-fencing kept showing them leaving the designated operation zones, often to do 'private work' or even make social calls. Workers were often simply abandoning the forklift trucks at the end of the working day.

When they discovered this practice they launched a search of the industrial estate and quickly found the remaining 'lost' forklifts. Needless to say they didn't go missing in that way again - and staff didn't go wandering from their workplace as much either.