Burden carriers are usually justified on intuition — everyone can see that walking is slow. Intuition does not survive a capital request. Here is how to build the number.
The core calculation is recovered labor hours
Everything else is secondary. The formula is straightforward:
Annual hours recovered = (walking time per trip − driving time per trip) × trips per shift × shifts per day × operating days
Walking speed is roughly 3 mph, or about 264 feet per minute. A burden carrier at even a conservative average of 8 mph in a facility covers the same distance in a third of the time, and real-world savings are usually better because the vehicle also eliminates return trips for forgotten items and multiple trips for loads too heavy to carry.
Worked example
A plant with a 900-foot run from the tool crib to the far production line. On foot, that is roughly three and a half minutes each way, or seven minutes round trip. By carrier, closer to two and a half minutes round trip.
Say four and a half minutes saved per trip, twelve trips per shift, two shifts, 250 operating days. That works out to about 450 hours annually. At a fully burdened maintenance labor rate, the vehicle pays for itself well inside the first year.
Run this with your own numbers. The inputs are easy to gather and the result is usually not close.
Secondary savings worth counting
Forklift availability. Every errand a lift truck no longer runs is capacity returned to the dock. If your lift trucks are a bottleneck during receiving, this can exceed the labor savings.
Fewer trips overall. A deck lets one trip carry what previously took three, which compounds the per-trip savings.
Reduced strain injuries. Hard to quantify precisely, but manual carrying of awkward loads over distance is a recognized contributor to back and shoulder injuries. Your safety group may have facility-specific numbers.
Costs to include honestly
Vehicle purchase, spare batteries, charging infrastructure, operator training time, annual maintenance, and the floor space for parking and charging. Leaving any of these out makes the case weaker, not stronger — finance will find them.
How to present it
Lead with the recovered labor hours and the payback period. Put the secondary benefits in a supporting section rather than the headline; they are real but harder to defend under questioning, and a case that rests on a solid primary number survives scrutiny better than one padded with soft benefits.
Send us your route distances and trip counts and we will build the model with you, including the pieces that argue against buying.