scope:

Introduction

Just as in any other vehicle, defects in industrial trucks (IT) can occur for a wide variety of reasons, for example due to:

• wearing of individual parts

• overloading in operation

• incorrect operation by the driver

• wrong deployment by the expeditor

• manufacturing errors

• design faults

The manufacturers are usually well aware of the faults which may occur during the guarantee period. These are generally not serious.

Apart from this, the manufacturers have ample documentation through their after-sales services and the demand for spare parts, which, however, is often not properly evaluated. There are generally no references in the data to the underlying operating conditions so that genuine comparisons are not possible.

The operators often have only an imprecise idea of the cause of faults and how to avoid them. In particular, the frequency of faults and their dominant factors are often wrongly estimated.

An industrial truck which breaks down frequently due to a minor fault is sometimes more negatively evaluated than one which is subject to major faults at greater intervals.

The fault code can contribute towards making both the costs and the causes of repairs to industrial trucks more transparent and comparable by means of uniform labelling with the aim of reducing repair costs and down times. This is done by coding.

The coding can be used for all models and makes of industrial trucks and can be evaluated using a simple computer program.