Most distribution and many manufacturing operations must deal with empty pallets – sometimes it’s a lot of pallets. They take space you could use for something else. They clutter your receiving areas. Sometimes they’re splintery, with nails protruding from the sides ready to bite a passerby. People re-use their pallets of course, holding onto them for a period of time until you can ship them back out. But while they’re in your facility, they can at space, potentially injure people, and generally cause trouble.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you are considering an automated picking solution, you have lots of choices. One of the more frequent comparisons is between horizontal carousels and VLM’s – vertical lift modules. Both essentially promise the same efficiency gain: they bring products to pickers rather forcing pickers to move to picking stations in shelving or racks. But which is best? That depends on what set of criteria you use, and what’s important to you.
Read the rest of this entry »

We all get it: labor is expensive. In distribution & warehousing  it’s one of the most expensive line items.

Automation and utilization of certain technologies (conveyors, as/rs, robotics) has helped alleviate these expenses and made companies more competitive, but there is no end in sight to cost pressures coming both from foreign competition and customer demand. Seegrid has created this graph, comparing the hourly costs of its driverless automated forklifts and that of a human operator.  The Seegrid trucks require no overtime, no dental insurance, and don’t take breaks. The unique thing about the Seegrid line is that it can deliver day-one ROI.

• Seegrid Automated Industrial Trucks

The ICWM (Institute of Caster & Wheel Manufacturers) has created a new set of standards for industrial caster manufacture and usage.  The standards, which cost $50 as a download from the ICWM’s website. It’s an excellent resource for engineers, designers, fabricators, and caster users.

• Download the standards here
• Cisco-Eagle caster tips & info

36% of forklift injury accidents involve pedestrians; that’s tens of thousands of accidents a year in the U.S. alone. And we all know that when it comes to pedestrians, there is no such thing as a minor forklift accident.

We’ve recently added a free eBook focused on this topic. It covers a range of processes, equipment, and training that you can undertake to help reduce the chances of fatalities or serious injuries in your operation.

Includes information on:

• Training – not just for forklift drivers. Not just for warehouse personnel. Not just for your employees
• Speed limits – why forklifts handle like bathtubs, and why that makes speed a safety concern
• Facility clutter – the enemy of safety
• Environmental factors – why lighting, noise levels, and visual clutter can cause accidents
• Solid vs. Visual – when should you utilize physical barriers vs. floor tape to demarcate lanes
• When to automate – How to deploy automated solutions such as motion sensors, safety gates, and more
• Traffic management planning – why you should create a traffic management plan. You already have one – it may just not be the one you want
• Links to relevant information from OSHA, safety consultants, and more

Download “Shared Space is a Dangerous Place” today. (1MB PDF file opens in a new window).

OSHA has recently released a guide to safety incentives, disincentives, and reporting issues. It’s worth a quick read if you manage a manufacturing, warehousing, or industrial facility.

This document focuses on reporting/non-reporting workplace injury issues. OSHA says that “Reporting a work-related injury or illness is a core employee right, and retaliating against a worker for reporting an injury or illness is illegal discrimination under section 11(c).”  Of course, smart companies want to know if there are unsafe conditions or practices. But what if your safety rewards program is discouraging employees from reporting incidents, or even near-misses?

Read the rest of this entry »

When was the last time you had your pallet rack inspected?

Every operation that operates mechanical lifting equipment is required by the  Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to inspect and document the safety of their racking systems. It’s the most common storage equipment in the world, and an inspection can not only help you comply with the law – it can help you see other issues in your warehouse. We have created a checklist of items to check and ways to check them.

• See the article: Pallet Rack Inspection Guide

Everyone likes to see how they’re doing vs. their industry peers.  This isn’t just a natural urge to compare yourself, it’s a vital part of doing business.

Benchmarking, at the heart of it, is comparing your performance to others like you. You look at your business processes and outcomes, and how they stack up to the performance metrics of industry leaders, your peers, and the best from similar operations. In warehousing, it is particularly important to understand where you are, and where you could be with reconfigurations, tweaks, and innovations that others are using to improve their numbers.  What do you specifically measure? Typically this can include quality, cost, and time. Specifically, it can get much more complex.

At the end it helps you understand the success of your peers and how you can reproduce that success.

Read the rest of this entry »

Safety is always a concern for industrial operations, but visitors take the dangers to another level.

In a fast-paced distribution center, there is plenty of forklift traffic, moving conveyors, packing machines, carousels, and dock doors. Same with manufacturing; you have all kinds of production machinery, welding (human and robotic), and heavy material being handled, stacked, or processed, along with the forklifts and other handling equipment. It’s hard enough to keep your own people – the ones who should know the lay of the land – safe in these environments. But what about visitors who haven’t had the benefit of your safety training and the situational awareness that your employees develop over time?

Read the rest of this entry »

In warehouse & manufacturing facilities, things break. They break in a number of ways, and it’s expensive.

You’ve probably seen product broken or damaged in ways that would amaze most people if you’ve been in this business for any length of time. Famous – well, infamous – product damage news circulates from time to time. Remember the guy who dropped a million dollars worth of expensive wine from his forklift?  We had a client once buy a bunch of mismatched, used shelving (not from us), only to see it collapse and dump thousands of tiny aircraft components on the floor. It had to be swept up and discarded since it was all mixed up and visually impossible to sort.

Those are extraordinary examples. Everyday inventory damage that cost “only” a few hundred or thousand dollars doesn’t make headlines, but it does impact bottom lines. So, let’s look at some inexpensive ways to limit damage.

Read the rest of this entry »