Why empty forklift rounds still drain a white-goods plant
A 55,000 sqm white-goods factory can look fully occupied while its internal logistics quietly leaks production time. Drivers circulate looking for the next job. They check boards, wait for radio calls, or simply drive the familiar loop until someone flags them down. Each empty kilometre costs battery or fuel and keeps the vehicle out of productive service. The lines themselves wait. When the next pallet or component does not arrive on schedule the station micro-stops. Those interruptions are short, yet they accumulate across shifts and across many stations. The habit of patrolling becomes the invisible operating cost that never appears as a line item yet shows up every day in lost output minutes. In a plant of this size the distance between storage, staging and assembly points makes the empty travel even more expensive. A driver who spends half a shift searching rather than delivering is effectively half a resource missing from the material flow.
The specific numbers from one AOS installation
In one documented case the plant invested €100,000 in Twinzo Logistics Management, the AOS module. AOS functions as an internal logistics marketplace, similar to a ride-sharing app. Operators or systems issue a material request through a button, a scan, a touchscreen or a direct connection from the MES. Drivers receive the task on their device and accept it. The model shifts from push to pull. Once the driver accepts, the system records who needed the material, which driver took the job, where that driver was at the moment of acceptance, the route taken, how long the task lasted and how far the vehicle travelled. The recorded outcome for that 55,000 sqm white-goods site was a 95% reduction in unnecessary patrolling rounds together with +20 minutes of production time recovered every day. Micro-stoppages at the lines were eliminated. Driver workload became more evenly balanced instead of some operators staying constantly busy while others continued empty circuits.
What the recovered twenty minutes actually represent
Twenty minutes of additional production time each day is a concrete operational gain, not a derived percentage. It is the difference between a line that waits for material and a line that receives the next delivery because the request was issued and accepted without the intermediate patrol step. The system also captures the full trail of each movement. That data stays available for later review by engineers who want to improve the flow further. The twenty-minute recovery is therefore both an immediate floor-level benefit and a signal that the previous idle-driving pattern has been interrupted. Over a full production week those minutes compound into hours of additional output that would otherwise have been lost to waiting. The plant did not need a complex simulation to see the effect; the daily recovery appeared once the calling system replaced the old habit of circulating until a task appeared.
Why this cost-benefit picture stays separate from fleet-reduction cases
Other published Twinzo results focus on Logistics Optimization with RTLS and show reductions in forklift counts or driver headcount. Those outcomes come from live positioning, spaghetti diagrams and route analytics. The white-goods example is different. It is a pure Logistics Management case built around the AOS marketplace and the Truck Calling System. The cost side is the €100,000 investment. The benefit side is the measured drop in patrolling rounds and the daily recovery of production minutes. Keeping the two stories distinct prevents the decision from being clouded by numbers that belong to a different module and a different problem. A plant looking at AOS is asking whether the cost of empty travel and the resulting micro-stoppages justifies the investment in a pull-based task system. That is a different question from whether real-time location data can shrink the fleet.
Checking the same trade-off on your own floor
Before any investment discussion, measure the current state of empty movement. Time how many minutes drivers spend without an active, accepted task. Count how often a production station stops because the next material movement was never requested or arrived late. Those two observations form a practical baseline. Compare them with the cost of standing up a pull-based calling system that records every request and every acceptance. The 55,000 sqm white-goods plant showed what that comparison produced: patrolling rounds fell by 95 percent and the floor recovered twenty minutes of production time every day. The comparison does not require inventing large euro multipliers for production value. The operational numbers themselves—the investment, the reduction in rounds, and the recovered minutes—already give a clear picture of the trade-off.