5 Safety Measures to Operating Equipment in the Manufacturing Warehouse
Thursday, March 5, 2015, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Every manufacturer understands that warehouse safety is critical to avoiding downtime and work stoppages. In fact, injuries are often the main reason why a manufacturer encounters a sudden and drastic decline in production throughput.
As such, here is a list of five critical areas you should focus on when looking to eliminate lost man hours due to unnecessary injuries.
-
Uncluttered Work Environment
Making sure that work cells and work stations are free of clutter guarantees that warehouse employees are free to move around without risk of injury.
The best approach is to focus on reducing clutter and obstacles within the warehouse, while making sure that employees are well aware of high-traffic areas.
-
Using Spaghetti Diagrams
Spaghetti diagrams allow management to layout the manufacturing warehouse space in a way that simplifies the workflow.
They offer a big picture view, while helping to identify where shelving units should be located and how they should be positioned.
The idea is to map out distances between shelving units in order to make sure that tow tractors and specialty trucks can easily maneuver without damaging inventory or causing injuries to employees.
-
Clearly Identified Risk Areas
Every warehouse has a given location where injuries are more likely to occur.
The best approach is to clearly identify high-traffic areas with warning signs, placards, bright markers and fluorescent floor tape.
All of these help to identify locations where narrow-isle reach trucks and turret trucks are most likely to operate.
-
Sturdy and Well-Constructed Pallet Racking and Shelving Units
Hydraulic dock lifts, rail lifts and scissor lift tables are always needed when warehouse employees need to access inventory at the top of a given shelving unit.
Well-constructed pallet racking and shelving units by companies like Arpac Storage Systems Corp ensure that those pallets and crates at their highest level of the warehouse are easily accessible, and most importantly, won’t fall.
-
Protective Equipment for Warehouse Employees
Make personal protective equipment mandatory for all your warehouse employees.
This includes wearing hard hats, safety glass, steel toe boots, and finally, high-quality industrial earplugs and or noise-cancelling headphones for those portions of the warehouse where the noise is the loudest.
Most of the injuries occurring within a manufacturing warehouse are avoidable.
It simply involves adopting some best practices and ensuring that all employees are aware of high-traffic areas and possible risks.
Finally, make sure all employees adopt simple and safe handling and storage practices in order to avoid any back-related injuries that may occur from lifting or moving large and heavy boxes.
Throw us a like at Facebook.com/doable.finance
