This is a great video from WorkSafeBC on how to prevent forklift injuries from a pedestrian’s point of view.
As a pedestrian in a forklift environment, it’s your responsibility to keep yourself safe. Anyone who runs a warehouse or industrial facility understands the dangers, and drivers should be trained. But do you train the pedestrians, the order pickers, the managers, and vendors who sometimes roam your facility?
If you’ve ever stopped at a traffic light, and shuddered at the texting, teenage driver in the next lane, you probably thought this is an irresponsible person who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Given statistics that texters are about as impaired as drunk drivers, it’s a real issue. The question is, do you tolerate that kind of distractions for forklift drivers in your warehouse?
We sell loads of shelving all over the country, and one of the persistent issues is the cost of shipping. In particular, that’s an issue for industrial rivet shelving, which is the most economical type of shelving with the highest capacity. It is easily the most popular industrial shelf type going. For many customers, shipping an all inclusive shelving system is the easiest, most convenient thing — we do it all the time.
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.
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 framepost 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.
Push back rack systems are excellent high density storage solutions — perhaps the most economical way to squeeze space out of a crowded warehouse. All loads are stored and retrieved from the same aisle. This reduces the number of aisles needed in a facility, freeing up more space for storage. Aisles can take a great deal of space up in a typical warehouse, so by implementing a pushback pallet rack system, you essentially swap selectivity for space. Push back rack systems provide a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) inventory rotation, so you have to be certain your load fits. If it does, congratulations — you’ve just saved a lot of space. But there are issues that can arise when pushback rack is inappropriately specified or utilized. Here are some of those…
It ought to be fairly simple, but specifying the right workbench for your application is something that deserves thought and pre-planning. Minor differences in the type of bench can provide critical benefits that add up to major productivity gains over time. Benches aren’t the simple, static equipment many believe. Here are some traits to consider
Application: A clear, flat surface is the basis for most workstations. The bigger question is this: how will it be used? Will you be packing orders? Repairing or assembling? Will it integrate with conveyors or assembly lines? Will you need access to certain supplies? Ergonomic considerations will play heavily into this part of the decision making process.
Environmental awareness, sustainability, ‘green’ or carbon foot printing, no matter what term you use today, everyone and every facility is aware that their processes need improving.
Whether you are in pharmaceutical, beverage, food, automotive, distribution, manufacturing or thousands of other industries today, there has to be some way to track and/or reuse what is not used within your daily operations. Many progressive industries are designing internal reclamation processes for utilization and recycling of goods they don’t need or are waste.
This white paper (PDF, opens a new window) explains various methods for removing refuse from your facility in a more organized, more controlled manner by utilizing conveyors.
Next time you’re standing there wondering where you’re going to put an inbound shipment while your dock is stacked with empty pallets, look at those doors (or at the void above them) – the copious space between the top of the doors and the ceiling is unused. Multiply each door by that amount of space, and in many operations, we’re talking serious amounts of unused square footage.
The easy solution: find a use for it with over-dock-door storage. You can’t really rack heavy stuff up there without some significant structure. The best thing to consider is empty pallets, which take up a ton of room and are relatively lightweight. And usually, they’re all over the floor and always in your way. Empty pallets clutter up the shipping & receiving docks or can take up positions in your racks that would be better suited to full pallets of finished goods or incoming shipments.
Over the last few months, we have been tweaking the conveyors offered on our website to offer a variety of options in a usable, easy-to-understand format. What we came up with is an online configuration system that allows great flexibility in changing the conveyor the way you want to change it.
Next time you’re standing there wondering where you’re going to put an inbound shipment while your dock is stacked with empty pallets, look at those doors (or at the void above them) – the copious space between the top of the doors and the ceiling is unused. Multiply each door by that amount of space, and in many operations, we’re talking serious amounts of unused square footage.
