# The Impact of the Sharing Economy on the Forklift Industry

As an important support for the manufacturing industry, the current management status of the forklift industry can no longer meet the demands of intelligent manufacturing. Forklifts are indispensable logistics loading tools in manufacturing. With the development of various industries, forklifts are increasingly widely used in production, warehousing, logistics, and other links, and the demand for forklifts is growing day by day. However, at the same time, the shortcomings of the original forklift management methods are gradually being exposed, and the utilization of forklift energy has also become an issue that has always received significant attention. 1. Supervision and planning issues. Forklifts need to shuttle between various locations within an enterprise to carry out operations. In labor-intensive enterprises, the number of forklifts is large, and under conditions of limited transportation resources, there are obvious deficiencies in forklift management, personnel management, and operation supervision. It is difficult to implement real-time positioning and supervision of forklifts, nor is it possible to effectively monitor the actual work of forklifts. A large number of improper operations may cause severe wear and tear on forklifts. When forklifts transport materials and equipment, a more fundamental issue is planning the movement trajectory of forklifts. This is because not only forklifts but also people move at a considerable speed between various locations. Within a limited space, if the movement trajectory routes of intelligent forklifts can be properly formulated, effectively preventing accidents becomes particularly important. 2. The issue of unified vehicle management. Given the mobility and maneuverability characteristics of forklifts, the forklift rental industry is currently developing well, but management methods still restrict the development and breakthroughs of the industry, and reforms in management methods are limited by technological applications. Rental records and forklift information are incomplete, and data such as registration and inspection documents lost during forklift resale make it impossible to trace forklift quality. At present, the forklift industry lacks the ability to aggregate and manage various types of vehicle information, such as speed, battery level, vehicle impact intensity, vehicle standby time, vehicle working time, and driver information, which cannot be intuitively provided to rental customers. At the same time, the ability for fault warning is almost zero, fault alarm capability is poor, remote maintenance guidance cannot be carried out, and forklift maintenance costs are high; it is also impossible to provide rental customers with data analysis reports on driver and forklift utilization efficiency, resulting in fleet efficiency and operating costs remaining persistently at high levels. 3. The issue of vehicle idleness. On the one hand, due to differences between peak and off-peak seasons, forklifts are in short supply during peak periods, while during off-peak seasons, idle forklift equipment needs to be sold or leased, and this process is relatively complex, leading to low forklift utilization rates at certain times. On the other hand, when a sudden need for forklift use arises, if the forklift cannot arrive in time, it will greatly affect production and transportation. The existing forklift sales and rental market has complex and changeable operating procedures and low efficiency, and information asymmetry also greatly affects the control of transaction costs. In today's Industry 4.0 era, the traditional management model of the forklift industry has become an important factor affecting the development of intelligent logistics and intelligent manufacturing. This is not only a problem for the forklift industry but also for other industries. Compared with the development of production technology, the transformation of management models is relatively slow, and the conflict between advanced production technology and traditional management models urgently needs to be resolved. Shared forklifts will become a major breakthrough in the sharing economy within the industrial manufacturing field. Not only shared bicycles, but more models and possibilities have emerged in the sharing economy, and the application fields will also shift from consumption to industrial manufacturing and expand on a larger scale. Given the experience of numerous current sharing economy projects, the advantages of the sharing economy model for the development of the forklift industry are gradually becoming apparent. It is believed that in the near future, the sharing economy will also develop in the direction of the Industrial Internet of Things. The reason shared forklifts can become a reality lies first in the nature of modern logistics systems and resources: logistics information resources, logistics technology and equipment resources, warehousing facility resources, terminal distribution resources, and logistics human resources can all serve as shared logistics resources, and forklifts are precisely the equipment used for material handling in modern logistics, so their practicality for sharing is extremely high.