Virtual Reality As Solution For Shortage Of Forklift Truck Operators

Forklift Operators Needed? Virtual Reality Can Help!

In some regions of the world, hardly any suitable logistics personnel – like forklift truck operators can be found. Filling vacancies for order pickers or forklift truck operators costs logistics service providers more effort. Forklift-Simulator has developed a solution to improve the pre-boarding and onboarding of new employees. The main elements: Virtual Reality and Gamification.

What is Gamification?

The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity. ‘Gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun’. It is used in training courses for pilots, surgeons, top athletes and also for forklift truck operators. (source)

Logistics Market Research

The labor market in logistics is under stress. In recent years, hundreds of millions of square meters of warehouses have been taken into use, largely for e-commerce applications. All these warehouses require thousands of employees who are some times increasingly difficult to find. Perhaps, in the long term, many functions may become superfluous due to increasing robotisation, but for the time being the demand for forklift truck operators and other logistics personnel is increasing faster than the supply of robots. This is the reason for more and more organisations not to locate their new warehouse in one of the trusted logistics hotspots, but in regions where the labor market is less tense.

Forklift Drivers Hiring

Today, traditional recruitment and selection techniques are no longer enough to find good forklift truck operators and other (logistic) personal. Shippers and logistics service providers will have to distinguish themselves with a surprising, innovative approach. New technologies such as Gamification, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality play a crucial role in this. Companies that effectively use these technologies for pre-boarding and onboarding, see new employees leaving less quickly and becoming productive faster. This leads to savings that can amount to several hundred thousand dollars per year.

A major problem in logistics is that many new employees drop out before they have properly started. About 30% will start looking for another job within a few weeks. The result is that an employer has to train people again. As a result, it takes even longer before an employer has employees who meet the required productivity standards. Pre-boarding can prevent many problems. It leads to new employees becoming familiar with the new working environment before their first working day. They know what awaits them, which means that they are less likely to leave.

Virtual Reality offers the possibility to give new employees a look in the warehouse in advance. By adding elements of Gamification, they can put a pallet away, pick an order or do other load handling by using virtual reality. Better said: potential forklift truck operators discover in an exciting, interactive way what their future workplace will look like and what their tasks are. At the same time, an employer already gets an idea of ​​the competences of the new employee. This enables him/her to adapt the familiarisation procedures and deploy newcomers directly at the most suitable workplace. Forklift-Simulator software can be fully personalised to any business environment, making it look exactly like the real workplace of the organisation through Gamifaction.

Also see: 10 Advantages Of Virtual Reality Forklift Training

Shorter Exposure Times, Lower Costs & No Damages

Virtual Reality in combination with Gamification also improves the onboarding of new employees. It offers the opportunity to familiarise them with the culture, norms, values, procedures and rules in the warehouse in an inspiring and interactive way. Difficult tasks for (new) forklift truck operators can be safely trained in a virtual environment so that newcomers reach the required productivity level faster. Gamification can also be applied afterwards – to seasoned forklift truck operators – to maintain productivity, quality and other KPIs. These are technologies with which the new generation of employees has grown up. This allows us to trigger them to work as effectively as possible.

Thanks to the use of modern technologies for pre-boarding and onboarding, companies spend less time looking for and training new temporary workers. Organizations can focus on their core activities again: delivering orders flawlessly, quickly and efficiently. In addition, the costs will go down considerably.

Please contact Forklift-Simulator. We are happy to tell you how virtual reality can improve your organisation.