The pandemic both reduced the available workforce and accelerated online sales. Warehouse operations grew and had to handle increased volume with fewer employees. Prior to Covid-19, the answer to this problem was to hire more fork truck drivers. Now, companies have difficulty finding trained fork truck operators. These circumstances caused many companies to take a second look at a technology that has been around for a long time: automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

Cost-effective AGV solutions

Before Covid-19, the ROI for AGVs only made sense for vary large manufacturing and warehouse operations. In many cases these larger facilities still needed to run two or three shifts to cost-justify the AGV automation expense. That has changed; reasonably priced AGVs are now available to smaller operations. Ironically, there is now a backlog on delivering orders of basic fork trucks.

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