Warehouse Safety A Necessity

Investing in safety is an absolute commitment that you can make to yourself while at work. Stack Group International, along with its partners, SSI SCHAEFER and A-SAFE have the solutions that you can use to build a safe working environment within your organization.

Warehouse Safety A Necessity

As warehouses look and feel safe, it is so easy for warehouse employees to be lulled into a false sense of safety. Unlike shipyards or construction sites, the potential for life threatening accidents appear limited.

But work place safety data compiled by various organizations, Government agencies etc., tell a different story. Although the numbers have improved over the past several years but transport and storage sector continue to have as many fatal and non-fatal major injuries as the marine sector. As for minor injuries, there were far more injuries in the transport and storage sector – over 2 times more – than there were in marine.

Some of the common contraventions include:

• Poor traffic management
• Unsafe use of racks
• Work at height

Traffic Management

Warehouses are busy places with many moving parts. In the rush to fulfill orders within ever tighter deadlines in this fast-paced working environment, slip-ups occur sometimes with dire consequences. Employees who drive or work near vehicles, whether vans, forklifts or prime movers are most at risk.

According to findings, some of the contributing factors resulting in accidents with other vehicles or pedestrians were no proper management of vehicular and pedestrian traffic within the premises, no mandated parking area for prime movers, no proper marking of pedestrian passageways at the premises and no formal training of drivers.

So how can we make the warehouse environment safe?

It is crucial for companies to take a good hard look at their operations, identify potential hazards within their premises and address them. This may involve an overhaul of the traffic management plan or something more targeted, such as improving the signage or establishing safe pedestrian crossings.

Whatever the company decides, it is important to keep employees inform and engage. For unless they are, all the effort made will come to naught.

Safe Use of Racks

Racks are the backbone of today’s warehouses. They help to maximize the use of warehouse height and organize product storage for streamlined picking.

Use properly, they are an asset to the warehouse. Misuse of the racks can have adverse consequences. A rack collapse triggered by rack overloading, or being rammed by a forklift can be disastrous. As racks nowadays can be up to 11m high with narrow aisles when one rack collapses, it can set off a chain reaction, affecting an entire row with cross aisle collapse its domino effect can wipe out a whole warehouse.

You can only imagine the costs involved as well as lost production time in today’s manufacturing environment where just-in-time production is the industry norm. Losing components means losing days of production time, as inventory is pared to a minimum.

How do you forestall this? You could:

• Put rack guards and safety barrier to protect the upright from vehicle impact;
• Ensure safe working load of beams to handle the weight of goods;
• Install signage of safe workloads and safe working conditions on all racks;
• Conduct periodic visual inspection of the racking system; and
• Educate operators on the correct positioning of the pallets.

Safety Barriers

Pedestrian and MHE traffic should be regulated and safe areas need to be created to enhance safe working environment inside Warehouses, Distribution Centers, Industrial plants etc. You can rely on us and our Partner, A-SAFE, inventors of the world’s first advanced polymer safety barrier range, to design and offer solutions, that not only protect the pedestrians but also your assets, saving you thousands on incident prevention and costly maintenance repairs and downtime. Researched and tested to BSI PAS13 2017 Standard. Our product range include:

Impact Barriers | Bollards | Rack End Protection | Rack Guards | Height Restrictors | Wall Protection | Equipment Protection | Topple Barriers | Gates | Alarm Bars | Safety Signs | Cold Storage Range | Antimicrobial Range | Hygiene Guard Screens

A-SAFE products are used by the world’s largest companies. Airports like Heathrow and Singapore, advanced production facilities such as BMW and Jaguar Land Rover, warehouses and distribution centers for DHL and Amazon and Industrial locations such as Jotun Paints and AkzoNobel Paints, in Kuwait.