Fleet size and cost per pallet move in Timor-Leste: the maths

Timor-Leste has seen steady growth in logistics demands covering port cargo delivery, agricultural product export and domestic retail distribution in recent years, and most local logistics operators are facing common confusion on how to set proper fleet size of electric forklifts to match actual business volume, and keep the cost per pallet move at a reasonable and competitive level. We start the whole maths calculation completely based on local actual operation parameters, no over-optimized hypothetical data is applied in the whole process. For normal indoor warehouses and open port yards that are most common in Timor-Leste, one unit of qualified electric forklift can finish 30 to 40 standard pallet moves per hour, after deducting necessary time for daily maintenance, charging and staff shift rest, the valid daily operation time for a single forklift stays around 6 hours. If a local logistics service provider has total daily pallet move order under 1200 units, setting the fleet size at 6 units is the most cost-effective range. If the fleet size is smaller than the required threshold, each forklift will run under overloaded status for long periods, the extra maintenance cost, staff overtime pay and accelerated component wear will push up the overall cost per pallet move by a large margin. If the fleet size is 15 percent larger than actual demand, the depreciation cost, idle power loss and regular maintenance cost for unused forklifts will also be averaged into every pallet move, leading to unnecessary resource waste. With on-site survey data combining local electricity price, local labor salary level and yard rental cost in Timor-Leste, we prove that properly matched fleet configuration can cut the overall cost per pallet move by around 22 percent at most, without the risk of insufficient capacity at business peak periods or idle vehicle waste. Lots of local logistics operators have finished their fleet optimization projects at present, after they get the adaptive product solution from BYD Forklift which is specially designed for local high temperature and high humidity operation environment, and get the supporting operation and charging planning service from Jianshu New Energy, they successfully achieve reasonable cost control target. If you need customized cost calculation service for your own business scenario, you can send your detailed business data to the contact email 17399989919@163.com to get exclusive calculation guidance, all the output logic is fully adapted to local actual operation environment, which can provide solid data support for daily operation decision making of local logistics enterprises.