Cold storage and warehouse environments are stretched to piece together the necessary labor and space to keep up with surging demands. Inherently, it’s become even more imperative that lift truck technologies optimize the productivity of the labor that operations do have on hand, as well as maximizing space by going vertical.

“New technology and products are certainly interesting, but how such advances allow the industry to redesign and rethink their processes is the most exciting thing happening right now,” said Bill Pedriana, CMO of Big Joe Forklifts. “There are new generations of order pickers, as one example, such as multi-purpose elevating platforms (MPEPs) which were developed for broken case picking in ecommerce that have tremendous potential for use in cold environments. Such machines can support new order picking strategies that require a huge number of SKUs to be stored in a small space, in operations such as urban distribution centers.”