By Alex Johns, President, ELOKON
Picture the email landing in your inbox from your VP: “What’s our forklift fleet utilization across all three distribution centers? Need the answer in five minutes.”
If you run a mixed fleet, you already know the truth: it takes much longer than five minutes to answer that question. You need to log into different vendor telematics platforms, pull spreadsheets from each, and spend hours, possibly days, reconciling numbers that rarely mean the same thing from one system to the next. That delay is the hidden operational tax mixed fleet operations pay every day, whether they realize it or not.
Why Fleet Visibility Matters
If your team is even asking the utilization question, you’re already thinking about your operation the right way. Warehouses need real visibility into how equipment is actually used and where hidden inefficiencies eat into productivity, and nowhere is that truer than with forklifts, one of the most expensive and operationally critical assets on the floor.
That’s why modern fleet management systems have moved from nice-to-have to essential. Done right, they reveal true utilization. That means not just how many trucks you own, but how often each one works, how long it sits offline, and where bottlenecks or safety risks are building. Hour-meter data, downtime tracking, repair alerts, battery status, impact logs, and operator behavior all feed one question: is your fleet running efficiently, or is your operation quietly paying for underutilization, unplanned downtime, and unsafe practices?
The Three Pillars of Fleet Management
A modern strategy rests on three interconnected pillars. Data-driven utilization turns raw telematics into decisions: which trucks are overworked, which are idle, whether to redeploy or retire an asset. For electric fleets, tracking charge cycles prevents battery damage from poor charging habits; for combustion fleets, tracking idle time cuts unnecessary fuel spend.
Advanced safety and collision avoidance rely on technologies such as ultra-wideband (UWB) sensing to create dynamic exclusion zones around pedestrians and other assets, and to automatically slow trucks entering high-risk areas like intersections or narrow aisles. Specialized environments such as very narrow aisle (VNA) racking need their own tailored anti-collision safeguards.
Operator accountability starts with access controls that ensure only trained personnel run specific equipment. Impact detection systems log sudden or excessive forces indicating a collision, and newer AI-based systems analyze driving patterns to flag habitual issues like hard braking or excessive speed, enabling targeted retraining instead of generic reporting after the fact.
Get these three right, and a fleet strategy pays for itself with fewer breakdowns, lower fuel and maintenance costs, safer floors, and a clearer picture of how each asset contributes. But all of it depends on something most large operations don’t actually have: a single, accurate, unified view of the fleet.
Where the Strategy Breaks Down
Enterprises run mixed fleets for good reasons: choosing the best truck for each application, maximizing procurement leverage, and avoiding dependency on one supplier. The problem isn’t the strategy but what happens once those trucks hit the floor.
Every manufacturer’s telematics system operates in its own isolated ecosystem, so a mixed fleet means data trapped across as many platforms as there are brands on-site. Worse, even a core metric like “utilization,” which is arguably the single most important KPI for capital planning, doesn’t mean the same thing from system to system. One vendor measures key-on time; another measures actual hydraulic activity. Without a shared definition or platform, the fleet is effectively deaf and dumb to its own operators.
Why the Obvious Fixes Don’t Work
Faced with this fragmentation, most managers reach for one of two solutions, and both fall apart in practice.
Standardizing on a single manufacturer means writing off millions in still-functional equipment, betting on one brand that likely doesn’t excel at every application (i.e. VNA, counterbalance, turret truck) and accepting a transition that could take a decade, all while forfeiting the procurement leverage that made a mixed fleet smart in the first place.
Building custom integration middleware to translate between vendor APIs looks like the technical answer, but it creates a permanent IT burden instead of solving the problem. APIs change on their own schedules, metric definitions never fully align, and the ongoing development cost becomes a standing expense the system can never quite outrun.
What Actually Solves It
The fix isn’t abandoning smart procurement but fixing the data infrastructure that punishes you for it. What’s needed is a unified data architecture: a single source of truth where every truck, regardless of manufacturer, reports into one platform using standardized metrics. That requires three capabilities: manufacturer-agnostic hardware, telematics devices built to work consistently across any brand; a single IT integration point, one centralized platform instead of juggling multiple vendor connections; and objective, standardized benchmarking, so optimization and capital planning decisions actually compare apples to apples.
The Real Cost of Flying Blind
When utilization data is fragmented, the losses are real and often invisible until you look for them. Fleet managers keep over-purchasing equipment because they can’t prove idle trucks at one site could cover a shortfall at another. Safety investigations slow down when the relevant data lives on incompatible platforms, delaying accountability. And highly paid operations leaders spend days each week reconciling spreadsheets instead of doing the strategic planning they were hired for.
Unifying that data delivers a measurable return the other direction: lower insurance premiums and fewer workers’ comp claims from faster safety response, maximized uptime from predictive rather than reactive maintenance, and better retention, since a workplace that visibly invests in operator safety tends to keep its people longer.
The Bottom Line
You made smart procurement decisions, finding the right truck for the right job, preserving negotiating leverage, eliminating single-supplier risk. Your data infrastructure shouldn’t punish you for it. The path forward requires breaking down manufacturer-specific silos so every truck, regardless of the badge on the hood, reports in a common language. Once utilization, safety, and accountability data are in one place, a mixed fleet stops being a liability to manage and becomes what it was always meant to be: a genuine strategic advantage.
Alex Johns is president of ELOKON North America, an international provider of forklift telematics and safety solutions that enhance safety, efficiency, and productivity in intralogistics operations. For more information, visit www.elokon.com.
