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Shipping Docks & Safety: Dealing with Blind Spots

August 17, 2010
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"forklift

Shipping & receiving docks are a particularly dangerous area of most operations because so much activity takes place in a confined space. You have truck loading, unloading, staging, inspections, and much more. You have people like order pickers, drivers and guests potentially in the mix. In your average warehouse, the docks take up 20% of the square footage but host 80% of the activity. As you know, at times that activity can be fast-paced – even frenzied as full pallets are taken in, or loaded ones are being loaded into trailers. This is a time rife with possibilities for accidents. How can you prevent them?

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Posted in Docks & Shipping|

Forklift Safety: Don’t Blame the Driver

June 24, 2010
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Forklift driver as seen from overhead in a warehouse. Forklift is in motion.

Most forklift accidents are blamed on operator error, but that is just partially true – and something of a cop-out. Rough estimates say that a quarter of forklift accidents could be avoided by addressing environmental concerns. When you eliminate those, it helps you understand better when a driver is truly ineffective, or just hamstrung by the way your warehouse is set up. In other words, before you point the finger at the driver, take a look at your operation. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Forklift - Pedestrian Safety|

This Forklift Accident Was Preventable

February 16, 2010
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You can see some of the mistakes happening in this video. Others aren’t so obvious.

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Posted in Safety & Ergonomics|

Warehouse Safety: Distracted Forklift Drivers

January 6, 2010
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forklift distractions

If you’ve ever stopped at a traffic light, and shuddered at the texting, teenage (or all too often, an adult) driver in the next lane, you probably thought this is an irresponsible person who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Given statistics that smart phone users are impaired as drunk drivers, it’s a serious and deadly issue; most states have laws specifically forbidding texting on the road. The question is, do you tolerate that kind of distractions for forklift drivers in your warehouse? Should you have the same rules? (Short answer: yes).

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Posted in Forklift - Pedestrian Safety|

How to Improve Order Picking without Automation

November 20, 2009
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picking from flow racks
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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Posted in Order Picking & Fulfillment|

Ways to Protect Overhead & Dock Doors from Forklift Damage

November 4, 2009
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dock door protectors in a warehouse

Walk any warehouse, manufacturing facility, or commercial storage operation and you’ll almost always find two things: forklifts and dock doors.

If that building has been in place for any length of time, you’ll also find dinged, dented, ruined or replaced dock door guides, pallet rack frames, building columns, etc. 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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Posted in Safety & Ergonomics|

10 Steps to Supply Chain Sustainability

July 17, 2009
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green warehouse conveyor

The Material Handling Industry of America has posted a video that may be helpful if you are starting the process of “greening” your supply chain.

Baby steps are important, especially at the plant level. For instance, in a recent Cisco-Eagle white paper (PDF), we point out the value of energy efficient conveyor motors. A thousand feet of conveyor outfitted with energy efficient motors could cut enough energy costs over five years to pay for 90% of the cost of the equipment. Also, besides its money savings and “green” profile, you are also saving on heat, which means the equipment may require less maintenance, and endure less wear and tear. It’s a win-win.

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Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|

Storage Efficiency: Shelves vs. Modular Drawers vs. Flow vs. Vertical Carousels

June 3, 2009
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Illustration comparing vertical carousels, shelving and modular drawers for storage density and space efficiency.

Storage systems are designed for different goals, but space efficiency is always important for growing and evolving warehouses and manufacturing facilities. Which storage equipment suits you, your application, product and needs?

Above: a visual comparison of space utilization featuring various methods. The vertical carousel provides the same amount of storage space as several rows of shelving or modular drawer storage. In this instance, the carousel saves over 1,400 square feet of floor space compared to shelving. Flow racks also compare favorably to shelving in terms of space utilization.

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Posted in Space Optimization & Planning|

Staged Shipments at Risk for Pilferage

May 25, 2009
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Receiving dock with staged shipments and open dock doors in a warehouse.

When things are staged at the dock, whether inbound or scheduled to be picked up, they’re particularly at risk for pilferage.

Any operation that stores, ships or receives valuable items is at risk of being hit – or is already being hit to some degree.  Thieves working at a shipping dock may simply wait until after a supervisor finished checking outbound shipments and add more to them before they depart. Since the shipments can sit on the docks for 90 minutes or more, pilferers have time to work on this. And it’s extremely difficult to detect. When thieves place extra cases onto staged pallets and those can ship out on trucks driven by colluding drivers.

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Posted in Security|

What’s the Most Useless Space in your Warehouse?

May 20, 2009
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storage above a warehouse dock door area

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.

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Posted in Space Optimization & Planning|

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