EHS leaders benchmark forklift risk across sites by choosing one exposure metric, defining it identically everywhere, and dividing it by activity so large and small sites compare fairly. Common choices are close forklift and pedestrian interactions, near-miss reports, impact events and speeding events, each expressed per operating hour of truck use. Lagging measures such as recordable injury rates still belong in the comparison, but at a single site they move too slowly to rank risk. The benchmark holds only if every site uses the same detection settings, zone definitions and reporting rules.
The full guide is Standardizing forklift safety across multiple sites. Recordable injury rates follow the BLS incidence rate method, which normalises cases to 100 full-time workers; apply the same idea to leading indicators by dividing events by truck operating hours from telematics or hour meters.
Check three things before ranking sites: detection systems use the same warning distances, near-miss definitions match, and operating hours come from the same source. A site with more reports may simply report better, so read near-miss counts alongside audit results. Leading vs lagging indicators explains which measures point to serious events.