Hydraulic Platform Lifts or Forklifts?

Written by: Brad Sylvester

For large scale manufacturing operations, shipping and logistics companies, and warehouses, hydraulic platform lifts can be tremendous productivity enhancement tools. Most large warehouses store materials vertically on multilevel pallet racks. To access those materials without a hydraulic lift platform, you need a forklift to bring the pallet down to ground level where the operator can remove those parts he needs. He then has to return the pallet to its position back on the rack. All of that takes a significant amount of time. If your assembly lines use a large number of different parts, this can add up to significant hours each time a line is restocked or switched over to a different assembly. Hydraulic platform lifts, or cherry pickers as they often are called, let the operator pick the parts from the pallet without removing the pallet from the rack.

Hydraulic platform lifts versus forklifts

Hydraulic platform lifts have the advantage over forklifts when a large percentage of your picking is for quantities smaller than a pallet's worth. The broad platform allows the operator to stack many parts by hand from the pallets in their elevated racks. Again, this is much quicker than retrieving pallets, pulling parts off, and then replacing the pallet. However, the equation shifts in favor of the forklift when the majority of orders or requests call for full pallets of materials. In these cases, the forklift can more easily retrieve the pallet from the rack and deliver it to the production floor or loading dock.

Forklifts still required

Having hydraulic platform lifts doesn't eliminate the need for forklifts. Even if the platform lift is used to pull all part orders from the pallet racks, a forklift will still be required for bulk moving operations such as loading and unloading trucks, hauling pallets of kitted parts to the production floor, removing finished goods pallets from the assembly area, and loading materials onto the pallet racks. While some of these activities can be carried out with handjacks, the forklift is still a necessity.

Care and maintenance comparison

A hydraulic platform lift will require much the same daily and weekly maintenance as an electric forklift. This includes battery charging station requirements, maintenance logs and regular safety inspections. One extra consideration for lift platforms is the need for regular inspection of the operator safety line. The integrity of this one piece of equipment can literally save the life of an operator who loses his footing while the platform is raised.

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