Level Up Your Service Partnerships for 2026: Forklift Power, Critical Power & Resiliency Done Right

As the year winds down, many companies are hitting the “pause” button to re‑evaluate service partners and contracts. It’s a timely move. 2026 will bring new unknowns: economic uncertainty, accelerating AI integrations, and tougher questions about backup power and critical power resiliency. To stay ahead, power up your partner relationships by focusing on three qualities: Responsiveness, Prioritization, and Strategic Support. These aren’t buzzwords; they’re the difference between smooth operations and costly downtime.

Why urgency matters: the real cost of downtime

Unplanned downtime is expensive across industrial and material handling environments. Multiple studies peg the average cost of downtime in manufacturing at ~$260,000 per hour, with some operations reporting impacts up to $500,000 per hour or more, depending on scale and sector. In warehouse and distribution settings, estimates commonly range from $10,000 to $22,000 per hour (and even higher in automotive), underscoring the financial stakes of keeping forklifts and material handling equipment online.

On the critical power side, the Uptime Institute continues to find that power-related issues are the leading cause of impactful outages, ~54% in recent surveys. When they do happen, more than half of operators report costs above $100,000, with roughly 20% exceeding $1 million. The takeaway: resiliency in your backup power and critical power chain is not optional; it’s essential risk management.

1) Responsiveness: The Ultimate Boost 

When a battery or charger goes down mid-shift, you can’t afford to buffer while orders pile up. A responsive partner ensures you stay powered up, whether it’s fast equipment replacement, battery swaps, or urgent preventative maintenance on high-duty trucks.

What to ask and verify:

• Guaranteed response times. Do they commit to specific SLAs for emergency calls and scheduled PM? The faster the first touch, the lower the probability of cascading costs that lift hour-by-hour.

• Multichannel access. Can you reach them? Communicate via phone, email, and portal, plus proactive updates, so your team never wonders when the tech will arrive or whether parts are en route.

• Proactive maintenance signals. Are they using telematics, CMMS, or asset platforms (e.g., predictive alerts) to catch issues before failures? Predictive approaches can cut unplanned downtime by up to 35% versus reactive models.

Emerging predictive maintenance tools and data driven scheduling are reducing disruptions and repair costs, moving you away from “wait to break” toward continuous health monitoring.

2) Prioritization: Are You Player 1 or Player 2?

Your operations are mission-critical. The right partner treats your facility like the main quest, not a side quest by anticipating challenges, communicating clearly, and making good on promises.

What to confirm:

• Scheduling logic. Will urgent work preempt routine tasks when throughput is at risk? In practice, that means prioritized forklift power diagnostics, battery health checks, and onsite techs queued for high impact lines.

• Resource allocation. Do they have enough technicians and parts staged locally to meet current demand and your growth plan? Maintenance teams cite lack of resources as a top constraint (reported by ~41% of manufacturers), so capacity planning matters.

• Alignment with your KPIs. A true partner aligns with your uptime, safety, and cost-per-move metrics because every hour of delay compounds labor idle time, missed shipments, and customer SLAs.

Prioritization also means safety. Powered industrial trucks remain a top OSHA citation area, with thousands of violations annually. Strengthening training, daily inspections, and certification reduces risk and keeps assets online. In 2021–2022, there were 40,513 forklift incidents resulting in days away from work, transfers, restrictions, or fatalities: noncompliance drives both human and financial costs.

3) Strategic Support: Play the Long Game

The best partner is your guru mapping optimal routes, avoiding pitfalls, and ensuring you have the resources to clear every level. In material handling, that means understanding your equipment mix, shift cadence, and core objectives, then using data to right size fleets, improve battery/charger utilization, and enhance backup power resilience. For critical it means choosing the right chemistry for your cycling and lifespan needs.

How strategic partners deliver:

• Industry knowledge & planning tools. From battery chemistry tradeoffs to duty cycle analytics, a partner should translate data into maintenance strategies and capital planning that reduce unplanned downtime. Predictive programs routinely report 12–18% lower maintenance costs and 30–50% less downtime.

• Critical power design. In facilities with high automation and tight SLAs, redundancy (dual feeds, UPS with healthy batteries, transfer switches, on‑site generation) is the first line of defense. Operators credit redundant power systems with avoiding outages, and the cost curve of power incidents is rising.

• Resiliency guidance. Public sector best practice frameworks emphasize holistic planning, covering power components, cyber/physical security, and clean energy integration, to reduce total risk and improve operational continuity.

Strategic support also addresses the human factor. Surveys link a significant share of downtime to process and procedural gaps, meaning better change management, training, and standard work can prevent many incidents outright.

What This Means for Forklift Power & Critical Power Resiliency

If you operate large fleets or high-throughput sites, power is about system-level resiliency, not just batteries and PM intervals. And when critical power is part of your operation, ensuring uninterrupted uptime and scalable capacity becomes just as essential. A well-chosen partner helps you:

• Reduce downtime exposure with rapid SLAs and predictive tools (cutting unplanned events by double digit percentages).

• Strengthen critical power posture with UPS health checks, transfer switch testing, and generator readiness for grid disruptions.

• Advance safety and compliance through operator certification, refresher training, and daily inspections to minimize violations and incidents.

Ready to Level Up?

Whether Concentric is already your service partner or you’re exploring new options, our goal is the same: to help you win. We combine responsiveness, prioritization, and strategic support to keep your operations running smoothly and position you for long-term success in forklift power, backup power, critical power, maintenance, and resiliency.

If you’re ready to level up your material handling strategy, let’s start the conversation and map out the next stage together.