Cliff Holste at Supply Chain Digest (opens in a new window) has a good piece on ways to improve picking productivity.

Distribution centers will benefit from emerging automated case picking technologies, but those don’t fit for every operation, at every level. They’re also expensive upgrades, so your ROI has to be considered as well.

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Talk about your ounce of prevention pound of cure scenario…

This forklift accident illustrates the importance of properly protecting the ends of pallet rack rows. The driver didn’t have much room to accelerate, but didn’t need much velocity to hit the rack hard enough to compromise the upright and start a domino effect that destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of alcohol (this was a Russian company, but forklift damage knows no national boundaries) and endangered warehouse employees. Utilizing bollards, steel guard rails, or upright rack frame post protectors might have prevented it.

It may also stress the importance of specifying sufficiently collision-resistant racks, such as heavy duty high-strength structural racks or totally-enclosed tubular uprights. Rack is often seen as a “stack it high” commodity, but in situations like that video, the value of correct specification and safety measures are underlined. If you have damaged uprights or unprotected rack columns, watch the video. And then get it fixed.

Walk around any warehouse, manufacturing facility, or commercial storage operation of any size, you’ll almost always find two things — forklifts and dock doors. If that building has been in place for any subastantial length of time, you’ll also find dinged, dented, ruined or replaced dock door guides, pallet rack frames, building columns, etc. It just happens that way. While many operations take steps to use guard rails or bollards to shield their critical machinery, dock doors can be left out.

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