Description

The customer target group, companies with more than 30 forklift trucks, lack adequate tools to manage their intralogistics fleets. Their problems include a lack of insight into the total cost of ownership of their vehicles, lack of transparency with respect to fleet utilization, missing domain knowledge, e.g. when comparing full-service offers versus a usage-based service, and also low degree of process automation, resulting in the use of several FTEs to process and audit documents such as service reports and invoices. Simply put, the customer does not know if they’re paying too much for their assets and the services at hand. The major forklift OEMs are aware of this and therefore make a large portion of their revenue with after-sales services and spare-parts.

ForkOn solves the “principal agent” issue between the big forklift OEMs and the end-customer. With the easy to use SaaS solution, the customers can save 20 percent of their entire fleet costs per year. This is achieved achieve this by consolidating and unifying different data sources such as data provided by the customers themselves, partner-provided data and external data sources. By continuously analyzing newly arriving data, ForkOn can alert the customer to any shortcomings in their fleet or operative processes as well as proactively provide tailored recommendations for operational improvements.

Innovations

Main competitors are the big OEMs, as they all have a fleet management solution in place. ForkOn is the only player that can provide an independent fleet management across forklifts of different brands and full transparency to the customer, as an approach is pursued that is independent from vehicle manufacturers and hardware features. The OEMs as main competitors, in contrast, are not interested in selling software solutions that undermine their service business and in generating transparency that would undermine their pricing system.

ForkOn has deliberately decided not to provide yet another additional hardware feature. Whereas the hardware feature providers offer highly specialized solutions in this field, they usually provide their own software for their features, adding to the complexity of different systems for the end-user, and generating additional aftersales profits. With the platform, customers are for the first time able to consolidate all available information from different systems in one place. Only a manufacturer- and hardware-independent solution can serve the wishes of customers and deliver sustainable added value.

Market relevance

The total addressable market (TAM) comprises more than 12 million forklifts globally, for which ForkOn can provide fleet management software and a marketplace for spare parts and services. This amounts to recurring revenue of more than 7.9 billion EUR annual revenue in the TAM. If additional verticals like semi-trailers (more than 25 billion EUR), yellow goods (more than 167 billion EUR) and others are included, the theoretical overall revenue rises to to more than 40 billion EUR recurring annual revenue.

The serviceable/segmented addressable market (SAM) comprises more than 7,362,000 Forklifts in the EU and the Americas with more than 3.9 billion EUR recurring annual revenue.

The serviceable obtainable market comprises more than 830,000 forklifts in Germany which leads to a recurring annual revenue inclusive spareparts of 594 million EUR. Thereof, the beachhead market comprises more than 830,000 forklifts that are currently running with the OEM tool ISM online, equaling recurring annual revenue for fleet management only of 141 million EUR.

The CAGR of the forklift market is around 5 percent. Forklift vehicles are the backbone of the industry that is ever more dominated by logistics. Developments such as the e-commerce revolution suggest that forklift trucks are becoming increasingly important as the number of intralogistic processes increase.

Customer benefits

The main advantages for the customer/user of ForkOn can be structured into three main areas:

First of all, the main advantage is the cost saving regarding the aftersales services, particularly regarding service, spare parts and contract management. The customer receives automatically generated analyses of service reports and invoices, containing proactive recommendations, e.g. changing the location of the forklifts in different subsidiaries (increasing utilization), changing contract types (e.g. full-service vs. cost-based models), change of ownership structure (leasing, rental or ownership), the purchase and storage of specific spare parts, the correction of incorrectly billed working hours, and much more.

Secondly, the advantage for the customer is based on optimizing and automating internal processes, saving time and resources of the customer.

The third main advantage for the customer is the consolidation of not only the software programs of the different forklift OEMs, but also the systems of the different hardware feature OEMs (battery management, indoor locating, software for analysis of sensors, etc.).

The overall advantage of all three aspects is based on the independency from OEMs and the resulting credibility.