Cat® Lift Trucks nominated twice in prestigious forklift awards event with the unique Active Sway Control
 
Every year the Fork Lift Truck Association (FLTA) in the UK holds their famous FLTA Awards for Excellence to designate the most eye-catching improvements and achievements in the materials handling industry. This gala event will be held in February 2011 when the winners will be announced in the following categories: ergonomics, safety, innovation, life time achievement, apprentice of the year and employee of the year. The Active Sway Control from Cat® Lift Trucks has been nominated in both the ergonomics and the innovation categories.
 
Ergonomics nomination
High level order pickers typically can operate at heights of up to 10 metres. This is the height of the platform so a standing operator reaches out for products even above 11 metres. High level order pickers fulfil an important role in warehouses that have been packed with racking to ensure an optimal storage density.  For the operator of a high level order picker, mast sway means discomfort and frustration. Just imagine the uncomfortable feeling of an operator in a cabin at 10 metres or so when a mast swings excessively each time he/she brakes or accelerates. Until yesterday this feeling was common on this kind of machines. The new Active Sway Control (ASC), featuring hydraulic pressure sensors and specially developed software, calculates and applies the necessary counter-movement to minimise sway.  With ASC applied, delays are halved – increasing productivity by 6% in typical applications. Not in the least because the operator feels at ease in his workplace.
 
Innovation nomination
Looked from the perspective of the operator, we can see the ASC bringing an improvement to the workplace and offering a better well-being.
But from a technological point of view, the Active Sway Control is a good example of solution thinking. It is an industry-first innovation that brings increased productivity to the area of order picking.
 
Product Manager Jan van den Elsakker from Cat® Lift Trucks is a confident man:” We are extremely happy and proud of this nomination and will keep our fingers crossed in two months. However, when we designed this software based solution, we all felt we were significantly improving the operator’s daily performance. We reckon we can eliminate up to 25 minutes of lost output per shift. It would be a fantastic reward for our engineers if we win another one of the prestigious FLTA Awards. We have already won the safety award once, but we like to keep winning.”
 
Let the voting begin
The voting starts on 1st December and runs until the 15th of January 2011. Voting is open for everybody interested in materials handling and can be done on the FLTA’s website (www.fork-truck.org.uk). The Awards for Excellence event will be held at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole on the 12th of February 2011. All the mayor players in the fork lift industry from the UK will be present and have been looking forward for this event for quite some time now.
 
More information on the FLTA: www.fork-truck.org.co.uk