REPAIR
Best practice in
MHE workshops
Most customers now rent
their forklifts either directly
from the manufacturer or
a nance company, so part
of that is the servicing,
according to Simon Lewis, senior service
manager for Rushlift, which sells and
maintains Doosan and other brands of
forklifts and MHE. “People maintaining
their own equipment – they’re rare.”
Those that do their own maintenance
often also operate and maintain road
transport eets. There are obvious
parallels, says John Eastman, chair of the
irtec licensing & workshop accreditation
committees run by iPlantE sister
organisation IRTE. He points out the
most important: if MHE is maintained
in-house, “it usually comes under the
jurisdiction of the eet engineer or
eet manager… they are ultimately
responsible and culpable if anything goes
wrong.
“Hence the need for a standard of
maintenance on forklift trucks as well
as road vehicles. That’s why we have
workshop accreditation and the irtec
licensing scheme for commercial vehicle
technicians; we also do workshop
accreditation for forklift trucks.” (See also
www.is.gd/edujon).
Forklift trucks (FLTs) and other items of materials handling equipment
(MHE) are an essential part of many operations. They need to be available
and in a t state for use at any time, so maintenance and repair must be
undertaken to a suitable standard, nds Toby Clark
Eastman cites a large supermarket
chain which has developed its
own standards for MHE
maintenance: “It has
a number of FLT
manufacturers
supplying vehicles…
and within the
distribution
warehouse is a
maintenance and
repair unit. It wanted
to know that the facility
is suitable and of a good
standard and ts within the
health and safety standards for
maintenance of those forklift trucks. And
we have a document that ts that.”
This is the IRTE’s ‘Materials Handling
Equipment Workshop Accreditation audit
document’, a 15-page checklist which
takes an inspector through the safety and
standards aspects of workshop practice,
including training levels, documentation,
work ow and quality control issues.
Eastman says that operators need to
put the onus on suppliers to ensure
that their technicians are
of the correct standard:
“The IRTE would like
the suppliers or
manufacturers of
forklifts to talk to
us to put together
an audit or testing
regime that recognises
the level of competence
of those people they
employ to maintain vehicles
for other companies.”
ALTERNATIVES
Other organisations o er MHE training:
the Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA) –
which recently merged with the British
Industrial Truck Association (BITA) to form
the UK Material Handling Association
(UKMHA) – provides short courses
and backs apprenticeships accredited
by the IMI. They have close links with
Winter 2021 www.operationsengineer.org.uk 31
/edujon)
/www.operationsengineer.org.uk