Big year ahead

As would be expected from any proactive trade association, BITA aims to support its members with guidance throughout this time to ensure they are able to concentrate on what they do best – making and selling fork lift trucks. Whilst we would all like to have 2019 mapped out, there are too many potential variables that will affect how our members go about business. To quote former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the "unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know", are the ones we will be looking out for. When these become apparent, we are resolved to focus on them and to work with members, end users, suppliers, stakeholders, government and other trade associations – both at home and globally – to ensure a smooth Brexit process at least for our members.

There will invariably be some significant changes to legislation post-Brexit, and BITA is well-placed to ensure that our members doing business in the UK and overseas are not disadvantaged. We have and will continue to have strong influence globally in the setting and upholding of technical standards surrounding the design, manufacture and operation of fork lift trucks, and we do not envisage this status to be diminished once we come out of the EU. Our members, and the end users of their products, can rest assured that we will continue to fight to ensure the highest technical standards continue to apply to fork lift trucks produced by our members for the UK market.

So, guiding our members through Brexit is one of the key ambitions BITA has for 2019. In addition to the regular work that goes one behind the scenes – such as providing market statistics and economic forecasts to our members – there are three key areas we intend to focus on over the coming 12 months.

Chief amongst these is safety – this is paramount to everything that BITA does. We will continue to concentrate considerable effort on increasing and improving both the integral safety of equipment as well as its operational safety. Industrial trucks are sophisticated, powerful machines, and we have committees and working groups set up to ensure their continued safe, efficient and environmentally-friendly performance. This can be achieved in three ways: they must be designed according to the latest technical standards and best-practice principles; they must be maintained regularly and professionally; and they must be operated carefully and to the letter of the law.

With these principles in mind, we will continue to engage at all levels to help drive down levels of workplace transport accidents. We have continual dialogue and collaboration with other UK and European associations as we all work to try and improve safety, something that every one of us in the industry must keep in the forefront of our minds. Once again, Brexit brings significant challenges to this ambition; for example, within the EU there were guidelines concerning imports that were not conforming to our high standards of safety. Who knows what deals will be struck on the run-up to March 29th that might open up import channels that have hitherto been closed?

Another area of focus in 2019 for BITA will be to take a leading role in supporting our members' shift towards greater levels of automation. It has often been quoted that higher levels of automation in the warehouse will spell the end of the fork lift truck. However, sales of fork lift trucks in recent years have remained robust despite a reported increase in levels of automation, which suggests that the flexibility of industrial trucks remains attractive, particularly as it is becoming increasingly more cost-effective to build automation into forklifts.

Our members' customers are always looking for more efficient ways of doing things – loading/unloading, picking, cross-docking… all the various tasks where a forklift is needed. But now a significant decrease in the cost of automating a forklift to perform, for example, repetitive tasks such as order picking, means the payback is becoming shorter. At a time when there is tremendous strain on the labour market in the UK, some of these technologies are already proving more cost-effective than employing humans to do the picking. 

This growth in automation and dual-mode forklifts means BITA also has a significant role to play, because it's a complicated area from a standards perspective. 

Finally, BITA needs to take a really strong leading role in attracting new talent into the sector. If you talk to any fork truck company in Britain, one of their biggest challenges is finding engineers and technicians. We have to find a better way of providing a talent pool of engineers – and beyond that attracting project engineers and other technical personnel – to this industry. 

The F-Tec fork lift truck training facility is going from strength to strength, churning out young engineers and upskilling those already in our industry. We recently helped support F-Tec's sterling work by offering space at our Autumn AGM and Thought Leadership Conference to F-Tec to stage its graduation ceremony in front of fork lift truck industry leaders, offering these graduates recognition for joining our industry. There are few other industries where you can come in as an apprentice and work your way up to become managing director. Recent BITA past presidents Mike Mathias and Tim Waples both did that.

Using inspirational examples such as that, we need to start making this industry a whole lot more attractive, and this is something which should be immediately apparent to visitors to IMHX in September.  

Talking of which, it is not widely known within the industry that BITA co-owns IMHX. We hope to address that at IMHX 2019, where visitors to our stand at the NEC will see that BITA has a raised profile. BITA's will be 18 months into its 'reboot' by then, with key events, key engagement and an underlining of the good things we do but are not particularly good at telling people about. 

Our slogan is 'Raising Industry Standards', a challenge that every BITA member faces, whether selling, supplying or operating fork lift trucks. Our presence at IMHX will be a showcase of what we do every day – we exist to support our members, to help them meet stringent safety standards and guide them through technical legislation.