IN Brief:
- The international agreement covers around 5,000 industrial trucks across several European countries.
- Jungheinrich's KN-RFM+ model combines a core fleet with scalable rental capacity and centralised fleet management.
- Lithium-ion trucks will form part of a wider model intended to improve utilisation, transparency, and cross-site fleet flexibility.
Jungheinrich has signed an international framework agreement with Kuehne+Nagel covering around 5,000 industrial trucks across several European countries, formalising a multi-year fleet relationship built around rental, service, lithium-ion equipment, and centralised digital management.
The agreement is based on Jungheinrich Rental Fleet Management, adapted into a Kuehne+Nagel-specific system called KN-RFM+. The model combines a core fleet with scalable rental capacity, allowing equipment numbers to change with operating demand while keeping management and reporting consistent across different sites.
France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg are among the countries where Jungheinrich already works as a fleet partner for Kuehne+Nagel. The new framework deepens that relationship and creates a common operating model that can be extended into other markets instead of leaving individual warehouses to negotiate separate equipment arrangements.
The trucks will include lithium-ion models from Jungheinrich’s portfolio. The technology suits operations where vehicles need to work across several shifts, although the practical benefit depends on duty cycle, charging strategy, and the ability to match fleet size to actual throughput rather than theoretical peak demand.
The scale of the agreement makes the fleet management element as important as the vehicle count. An estate of around 5,000 trucks spread across several countries will contain equipment of different ages, utilisation patterns, service histories, and local demand profiles. Managing that estate through a shared framework gives Kuehne+Nagel a clearer basis for comparing sites, identifying underused assets, and moving temporary capacity to locations where it is needed.
That flexibility matters in contract logistics, where warehouse demand can change quickly with customer wins, product launches, seasonal activity, inventory policy, and contract transitions. A fixed fleet sized for peak conditions can leave expensive capacity standing idle for much of the year, while a fleet sized too tightly can become a constraint as soon as inbound, picking, or dispatch volumes rise.
The KN-RFM+ structure is intended to sit between those extremes. A stable core fleet can cover normal operations, while rental vehicles can absorb temporary peaks without forcing each location to maintain permanent spare capacity. The commercial value depends on whether the rental element can be added and removed quickly enough to follow changing workloads.
Digital fleet management is central to that model. Standardised information can give managers a common view of truck populations across countries and sites rather than relying on separate local records or supplier-specific reports. The operational gain comes from making utilisation, availability, and fleet composition comparable when decisions are made about retaining, redeploying, or adding equipment.
Service is equally important in a fleet of this size. Material handling equipment has a direct effect on warehouse throughput, yet maintenance problems can remain a local engineering concern until a shortage of available trucks begins to affect receiving, replenishment, or dispatch. A common service framework provides a route to standardise maintenance expectations and performance measurement across a network operating under different local conditions.
The agreement also reflects a wider change in how large logistics operators treat mobile handling equipment. Rental has long been used to cover short-term peaks, but larger networks increasingly need temporary vehicles to sit inside the same safety, charging, service, and data standards as the permanent fleet. That becomes difficult when individual facilities work with different providers and different reporting systems.
Lithium-ion equipment adds another standardisation requirement. Charging windows, battery sizing, and shift patterns all affect whether the trucks deliver the expected availability. A common fleet framework can simplify training and equipment planning across several countries, but only when the selected vehicles match the duty cycle of individual warehouses rather than being imposed as a single template.
For Jungheinrich, the framework provides a substantial installed base tied to continuing service and rental activity rather than a one-off equipment sale. For Kuehne+Nagel, it places fleet flexibility, maintenance, and data inside one international arrangement while retaining room for local operational adjustment.
The companies have not set out a fixed timetable for deploying every truck covered by the framework, which reflects the nature of the agreement. The more useful measure will be whether the model reduces idle equipment, maintains truck availability through demand peaks, and gives warehouse managers enough visibility to adjust capacity before fleet shortages begin to restrict throughput.
