Answer to facilitator question

Facilitator's Question:
Explain the reasons of high popularity of counterbalanced forklift truck (as shown in your Bog) for material handling.

Answer:
Inventory reduction efforts over the past couple of decades have increasingly changed the focus from warehousing and storage density to material handling and speed. With current years, warehouses are becoming more movement and productivity focused and, in rapidly changing markets, flexibility and cost are getting a lot of attention.
The fact is, the standard wide aisle counterbalanced lift truck design that’s been used for more than 50 years still remains a very viable option. This is due to the flexibility to pick a load out of pallet rack and load it immediately onto a trailer combined with fast travel speeds (compared to the reach truck), a short learning curve, low cost, higher weight capacities. Additionally, with great variety of forklift attachment such as the clamps, side shift, load push pull and rotating head available, it gives the forklift a great versatility when loading different shape, size and weight loads. With a great variety of attachment, it also mean that there is no need to invest in different types of equipment for a specific job, just get a forklift and its attachment for the job. Furthermore, the cost in investing in a forklift is so much lesser compared to the other equipments such as the reach truck. Wide aisles also provide more flexibility with diverse load sizes and weights.

The table below gives you a comparision:
please view the table at this site: http://www.inventoryops.com/Aisle%20Width.htm