The recording unit: a camera on a pallet frame.

• A self contained camera enclosure on a pallet style frame. The frame is the interface to the forklift, so lifting the unit is the same action as lifting a pallet. No adapter, no fitting, no training in how to attach it.
• Any forklift can lift it. Counter balance truck, reach truck, whatever runs the aisle you want counted. It is not assigned to one vehicle, so it moves between forklifts during a shift and between sites during a rollout.
• Nothing is fitted to the vehicle. No brackets welded on, no cab wiring, no power tap, no forklift out of service for installation, and no per forklift licence. When the count is finished the forklift is a forklift again.
• Nothing is installed in the building. No anchors, no reflectors, no markers on the racking, no charging bay to build, no network hardware to commission. There is nothing to remove if you move warehouse.
• It reads the labels you already print. The unit is taught your label format during calibration. Sites do not relabel stock or add codes to the racking to make counting work.
• Full warranty and ongoing support are included. Both sit inside the annual fee rather than being a service contract on equipment you own, because you do not own it.

Three figures to plan around

• It works in a freezer. Do not leave it in one. The unit operates down to minus 20 °C, but its storage range stops at 0 °C. So it counts a frozen aisle and then comes back out to a tempered area for the night and for charging. Plan a parking spot above freezing before you plan the count, and read cold chain and frozen for how sites actually run this.
• 104 kg net, which is why a forklift lifts it. This is not a device anyone carries, and it is not meant to be. The mass buys the 200 Ah battery that gives eight hours of counting and the on board computer that processes the run, and it makes the frame stable enough to hold focus at 1.5 m while a forklift moves down an aisle. A forklift lifting 104 kg is a forklift doing nothing unusual.
• 2 TB of storage at 3 GB per minute is about 11 hours of recording. That sits comfortably above the eight hour operating time, so the battery runs out before the disk does. You will not lose the back half of a shift to a full drive.

Aisles and racking height

Aisle width and racking height are limited only by forklift accessibility. If a forklift can get down the aisle and reach the level, the unit can record it. Wide aisle and narrow aisle are both supported, and racking height is a question of the forklift's lift rather than of the camera, because the unit is raised to each level in turn and reads one level at a time. There is no camera side minimum aisle width, because the constraint is the vehicle you already run.

Where labour is scarce, or aisles are unmanned at night, a drone or a ground robot counting unattended is the better fit. What the carried unit trades that driver time for is a five day deployment, no hardware to own, no facility change and zero integration effort to start. The two positions are set out side by side on Sentispec compared with inventory drones and compared with warehouse robots.

Because there is no capital equipment required, adding and removing capacity is a line on an invoice rather than a procurement cycle. Site and network pricing is published in full on pricing.