UgoPilot: A game-changing platform for managing industrial forklift performance in material handling

The evolution of industrial forklift performance

Today’s material handling teams are under constant pressure to improve their productivity and throughput—all while reducing energy costs and carbon emissions. However, many lack visibility on the performance of their forklift fleet’s operations and struggle downtimes due to the unpredictable and short lifespan, charging and maintenance of their trucks’ legacy batteries.

However, UgoWork’s revolutionary lithium-ion batteries technology and Energy as a Service approach for fleet management and optimization are helping material handling managers adopt a multi-pronged, integrated approach to achieving their operational and financial targets.

UgoWork innovates with its unique energy management platform, UgoPilot™. This platform empowers managers, giving them the autonomy to proactively track, monitor, manage, and optimize their forklift batteries and energy usage, all while having rapid support at their fingertips.

Say hello to UgoPilot, the smarter way to manage industrial batteries.

UgoPilot: Beyond traditional fleet management

Bridging the gap between energy data, actionable insights and proactive management

UgoPilot stands out as an intuitive, cloud-based fleet management and lithium-ion battery solution for industrial trucks, catering to a plethora of industries, including the food and beverage (cold storage), 3PL, warehousing, manufacturing, and pulp and paper sectors. It provides real-time insights and personalized data-driven decision-making tools to optimize battery usage and fleet performance in ways that were never possible before.

Features and benefits: powering the next generation

Let’s delve into how UgoPilot sets the gold standard for lithium-ion battery optimization, by exploring its core features and benefits:

Track – Live fleet status

Access real-time data of your fleet, such as remaining autonomy, charging status and pending issues. 

Monitor – Customizable dashboards

Gain peace of mind about how your fleet is contributing—or not—to your most critical KPIs, such as emissions reduction, fleet activity and energy consumption.

Manage – Instant notifications

Configure alerts to keep relevant team members in the loop about each truck’s remaining autonomy, inactivity or ongoing problems. The notification system, available on all types of devices, provides a swift way to communicate with operators and resolve issues before they cause profit-busting downtimes.

Optimize – Customize reports and strategic recommendations

Thanks to its easy-to-understand interface, UgoPilot educates users about optimal battery usage and how to strike a better workload balance across all trucks. Based on complete fleet visibility, UgoPilot can also recommend the ideal number of trucks for various material handling workflows.

Support  – Help at your fingertips

UgoPilot features a rich knowledge base to make the most out of all of UgoWork’s solutions, offering a central hub for customer service information, product manuals, FAQ, and more.

It’s important to understand that UgoPilot goes beyond reporting and alerting mechanisms. It generates a comprehensive view and facilitates the understanding of material handling trucks so that businesses can:

• Mitigate the risks and uncertainties associated with unplanned downtimes and operational bottlenecks. How? Through better predictability.

• Reduce the size of a team’s material handling fleet for the same or even increased throughput

• Generate the lowest CPU (cost per unit) by optimizing the TCO (total cost of ownership) / throughput ratio, to maximize the useful life of truck assets

Success stories from beta testers: UgoPilot in action

Boosting capacity with less trucks

One of UgoWork’s customers ordered 136 lithium-ion batteries to replace their 150 lead-acid batteries, which represented an expected 9% fleet reduction thanks to the improved efficiency of lithium-ion. After commissioning several UgoWork batteries and working with both UgoPilot and the company’s dedicated Customer Success Manager, the customer got the demonstration by data that a much more important fleet reduction could be conducted. He then decided to start implementing UgoWork to another site by using the excess batteries from the initial order.

The end results? The company was able to remove 57 units at the first site (batteries and forklifts), which represents a 38% fleet reduction, thanks to the data provided by UgoPilot.

Maximize fleet usage with data

In another use case, a large automotive OEM wanted to perform a stress test to know if it was possible to add a night shift without adding more equipment. They wanted to do it with a security factor, within known parameters like their existing equipment, the people, their supply chain. And they wanted to have it in a sequence of events that was representative of their operations.

The Customer Success Manager simulated the energy requirements based on the additional workload, considering average, worst and best cases scenarios. The stress test was meant to confirm that despite the addition of a night shift,  they would still be able to make it through the end of the day, for 5 consecutive days.

The figure below shows the result of the simulation. We can see that there is a slight diminution of the state of charge as the week advances, but there is still a comfortable margin of error (25%) on the last day. Then the batteries can regain their maximum state of charge over the weekend and start the following week at 100% SOC.

The fact that UgoWork came up to that conclusion and was able to perform the demonstration based on data was instrumental in the customer’s decision to increase their throughput capacity by 50%. No other manufacturer provided that service.

Taking the next step with UgoPilot

Interested in learning more about UgoPilot and how it can be integrated within your material handling operations? Contact us for a demo!