This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Ken Rawlings, VP of Product and US Operations at Litum, on October 5, 2026.
A plant manager can usually tell me, to the hour, how much a given truck ran last month. Impacts, battery cycles, service intervals, hours against the lease.
The data is there and it is good.
Then I ask which truck came closest to hitting someone last Tuesday, who was driving it, and whether its inspection was completed that morning.
The room goes quiet.
That gap has followed me through twenty-odd years in industrial software, and it is not a data problem. It is a question of what we decided to measure.
We connected the truck to report on itself
Forklift telematics is a mature product category. Every major lift truck brand offers it, it ships on a large share of new equipment, and plenty of sites are getting real value out of it.
Read what it actually reports, though, and a pattern shows up quickly.
Runtime. Impacts after they happen. Battery health. Maintenance intervals. Utilization against the lease.
Every one of those is the truck describing its own condition to the people who own it.
Not one of them has anything to say about the person crossing the aisle.
That was a reasonable place to start. The questions being asked at the time were maintenance questions and cost questions, and the sensors that answer them are cheap and already on the vehicle.
But it means a site can be running a fully instrumented fleet and still have no idea what is happening in the two meters around each truck, which is where the harm occurs.
There is a second-order effect worth naming. Because most of this arrived through the manufacturers, a mixed fleet inherits the fragmentation.
Three brands on the floor tend to mean three portals, three data models and three renewal conversations. The oldest trucks, often the ones working the tightest corners, are usually on none of them.
Safety engineering stopped at the machines that hold still
The other half of the explanation sits in how industrial safety matured.
For fixed equipment we built a genuinely strong discipline: fixed guards, interlocks, light curtains, lockout procedures. It works because the hazard is bounded. You know where the danger is, you know roughly where the operator will stand, and you can put something physical between the two.
A forklift undoes all three assumptions at once.
The hazard moves through the building. The sightlines change the moment a load goes on the forks. And the people at risk are not standing at a station, they are walking somewhere else entirely, thinking about something else entirely.
With no way to engineer that out, the industry leaned on the controls it had: training, signage, floor markings, mirrors, a horn at the intersection.
Every one of them works by asking a person to notice something at the exact moment they are least likely to. That is a thin layer to have between a moving truck and someone on foot, and at most sites it is the only layer there is.
ISO 3691-4 has been pushing the industry toward detection on the vehicle itself, which is the right instinct.
If the hazard travels, the control that watches for it has to travel too.
The questions that come due later
In the US operations I spend my time in, the cost of this shows up as a set of questions nobody can answer with evidence.
- The insurer asks for collision history and receives anecdotes.
- Corporate EHS asks why one plant reports more events than another, when the likelier explanation is that one plant reports and the other does not.
- Procurement asks at lease renewal whether the site really needs two more trucks, and gets an impression rather than a number.
- Someone asks who was operating truck 14 on second shift, and the honest answer is that the site is fairly confident.
Underneath all of it sits the loss that is hardest to quantify.
An impact gets logged because the truck felt it. The encounter where nothing was touched leaves nothing behind at all: the operator stopped in time, the pedestrian carried on without ever learning how close it had been, and the vehicle had no reason to record anything.
Those are the events that predict the serious ones, and they are exactly the events the current instrumentation is blind to.
There is a workforce dimension to this that has grown harder to ignore.
Training-based safety quietly assumes tenure. It assumes the person on that truck has been on that floor long enough to have learned where the bad corners are and who tends to cut through where.
Given the turnover, temporary labor and contractor traffic most US sites are managing now, that is a heavy load for an assumption to carry.
Scope it as an asset problem
The reframe that changed how I think about this is a small one. Forklift safety usually gets scoped as a facility project, and it is better understood as an asset project.
Scoped as a facility project, it arrives as a site survey, a network conversation, an infrastructure build and a capital request competing against production spend. It slides to next year more often than it gets rejected.
Scoped as an asset project, you do what you would do with any other critical piece of equipment. You instrument the asset. Whatever sits on the truck travels with it across brands, across ownership models and through the next lease turnover, and you can start with the six trucks working the worst corners rather than the whole site.
What we built
This is the thinking behind PathAware®.
The premise is a simple one. The interactions that matter most around a forklift should leave a record, and not only the impact the truck was able to feel. The near miss too. The shift it happened on, the truck it involved, the operator who keeps encountering the same risk.
Once those are captured, the questions from earlier start to have answers.
Risk resolves into dashboards that show how it is actually distributed across the fleet: which shifts, which vehicles, which operators. Patterns surface early enough to act on. Training goes where the data says it is needed rather than where the last loud event happened. And you can tell whether a corrective action moved anything or only felt like it did.
The insurer conversation stops being anecdotal. The comparison between two plants becomes a comparison of exposure rather than of reporting culture. The encounter where nothing was touched finally leaves a trace.
Alongside that, operators identify themselves at the vehicle with an NFC card or a compatible Litum tag, so a truck starts only for someone authorized to run it and every shift is attributable to a named person.
All of it runs on the vehicle. PathAware® is retrofit and fitted truck by truck, with no facility RTLS, no fixed infrastructure, no cameras and no mandatory wearables. Pedestrian detection is tagless by default, with no facial recognition and no stored imagery, and UWB adds vehicle-to-vehicle awareness past the sensor’s line of sight, including the blind corner mirrors were never going to solve. Because the system travels with the truck, it works across brands and models, leased or owned.
Three tiers keep the decision from having to be made all at once.
- PathAware® Core is plug-and-play proximity detection with alerts through an in-cab display, and helps reduce collision risk from the first shift it runs.
- PathAware® IQ adds a connected software layer for safety visibility, accountability and control through the in-cab display, so detected events become records and a truck starts only for an operator authorized to run it.
- PathAware® IQ+ adds inspection workflows and utilization insights, moving pre-operation checks onto the in-cab display and putting active time, idle time and engine-on time in front of the people making fleet decisions.
Sites that want facility-wide traffic analysis and movement patterns will still want RTLS eventually, and PathAware® is built to extend into it.
Your fleet has been telling you about itself for years. It is a fair time to ask it what is in front of it.
If your trucks report their hours but not their near misses, I would be interested to know what has kept it that way. My guess is that it is organizational more often than it is technical, but I would rather hear it than assume it.
PathAware® is Litum’s forklift safety and telematics product, running on the vehicle rather than the building, with collision awareness, operator control, digital inspections and utilization insights across three tiers.
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