If you’re setting up a new warehouse, it’s important to get safety right from the start. Warehouse safety is important, and if you don’t have a safe warehouse from the beginning, it’s not only can be a dangerous place to work, it can also be costly to correct early mistakes.
Although there are experts out there who can help with safe warehouse design, it’s also important that a warehouse owner or manager approaches their new warehouse design with safety in mind. With everybody onboard, safer outcomes can be achieved.
Let’s look at some of the ways to ensure a warehouse is safe, both in general and when opening a new warehouse.
Create A Safe Warehouse Layout
Warehouse safety often starts with a safe warehouse design. While a good design doesn’t necessarily eliminate all safety hazards, it can go a long way to removing many of the risks associated with working in a warehouse.
One prime example of this has to do with vehicles in the warehouse. Vehicles in a warehouse, which include not only forklifts but also trucks and cars in some areas, pose a serious safety risk to pedestrians in a warehouse. Designing a warehouse with minimal shared space between pedestrians and vehicles is a good first step towards safe warehouse design. From there, other aspects of safety like barriers, mirrors, and pallet racking protection can also be considered.
Other safety warehouse design practices include barriers and security for specific areas that may contain hazards, line markings to indicate where people can walk safely without tripping or running into each other, and good pallet racking design.
Although there’s a lot of common sense here, it’s always worth speaking to an expert, who will likely have more innovative ideas on how to design a warehouse safely.
Get Pallet Racking And Shelving Right
Pallet racking and warehouse shelving can introduce danger to a warehouse. Goods can fall off of pallet racking or shelving, and the storage units themselves can even collapse. The easiest way to avoid the basic safety concerns is to get shelving and pallet racking professionally installed. This ensures that both are compliant and minimises the risk of collapse and other accidents.
From there, it’s important that pallet racking and shelving is used appropriately. Generally this means not overloading storage or storing goods improperly. Doing either of these things can lead to collapse or goods falling.
Ultimately, using storage system properly comes down to the safety culture in a particular warehouse. A culture of safety is actually a fairly major step in creating a safe workplace overall. We’ll talk more on this later.
Consider Conveyor Systems Where Appropriate
Although generally installed for convenience and speed, conveyor systems can also be an excellent safety mechanism in warehouses.
As already mentioned, separating vehicles from pedestrians as much as possible helps keep everyone safe, and conveyors help with this because they limit the need for people and vehicles to travel throughout the warehouse: they keep everything in specific areas.
Conveyors can also help prevent general workplace injuries from lifting because less physical work is needed to move goods throughout a warehouse.
And they have the added benefit of speeding up warehouse operations. So, what may be seen as an optional set up cost may actual turn out to safe money long.
Have A Culture Of Safety
A culture of safety is, perhaps, one of the most important things when building and fitting out a new warehouse. If warehouse staff see that a new warehouse emphasises safe design and safe practices, they’ll be more likely to work in a safe manner. Similarly, if warehouse owners and managers are seen to care about safety, employees will follow suit.
A culture of safety can fill the gaps where you can’t design for safety. A safe layout can only go so far; ultimately, for example, there may need to be an area that is shared by both forklifts and pedestrians. Encouraging people to behave safely in these areas minimises the risk.
A culture of safety also discourages the improper use of equipment and storage, reducing general accidents and things like pallet racking overloading.
How Safe Is Your Warehouse?
If you’re not sure if your warehouse is safe enough, or if you’re fitting out a new warehouse, we can help. Our expert team at Colby Dandenong is more than just warehouse storage. We can also advise on safety, warehouse design, and more. Contact us today.
