scope:

Investments in and operating costs of their fleets involve a high level of expense for the operators of industrial trucks. Maintaining a constant overview of the costs is not possible without making an analysis of the cost structure.

The aim of this updated guideline is to enable a meaningful standard calculation, based on empirical procurement and operating costs, for a planned deployment of industrial trucks.

It should support not only

• the industrial truck operator planning to extend or partially replace his fleet

but also

• a planner who gets engaged for the first-time in the deployment of industrial trucks

in coming to a decision. In Section 3 and Section 4 the factors are described and evaluated which apply in defining the conditions for a planned deployment of such trucks. From these the decisive arguments for selecting a particular industrial truck (drive type, load capacity) can be derived. Important are also the alternative solutions which emerge from comparisons and for which cost estimates are then calculated as well.

In Section 5 and Section 6 the terminology is clarified and the calculation procedures are explained and the latter are illustrated in Section 7. Here the user of this guideline can check his cost-efficiency using his own values.

The cost calculations in Section 7 are intended to provide a fast, orientating overview of the possible development of total costs per hour of operation for an industrial truck under the same conditions byduty category, load capacity and drive type. Since the comparison calculation is structured in the same way for all vehicle types a graded comparison is possible.

It is left up to the user of this guideline to use the numerical values he has obtained himself as input, for example, investments, drive energy, etc. In making his own calculations he should take into consideration the notes on cost comparison methods in Section 7. However, at this point global comparability disappears