Even today, despite all the knowledge on how poor floor quality care can impact safety, materials handling equipment (MHE) and warehouse productivity, there is still much neglect of floors in the UK, believes the CoGri Group, a consortium of international industrial floor solution specialists dealing with concrete floor issues. This, believes CoGri, is because most warehouse users have a misguided belief that a concrete floor is indestructible and treat it with little regard. The result is that a maintenance budget for the floor is rarely put in place. Yet the annual costs of such a budget are tiny compared with the costs of continuing neglect. CoGri believes that for a 50,000 ft2 new warehouse, handling a variety of forklifts, including VNA, the budget need not cost more than £2,000-£4,000 per year.
Regrettably, most floor repair works are reactionary rather than preventive but such a policy costs much more money in the long run, not just on the floor but on maintenance of MHE and the operators using them. So just how numerous and serious are the problems of floor neglect?
Problems can be divided into three main groups: safety, productivity and damage. Safety can be compromised in so many different ways. Slips, trips and falls are the most obvious outcome when floors are not kept tidy and clean and they could be costing the UK economy over £850 million a year. But it is not just about keeping floors tidy, especially when mechanical traffic must mix with pedestrians. Many accidents in the warehouse environment involve trucks hitting people, so clear road and line markings are “a critical part of any site,” says line marking specialist, Rocol. Extra measures, however, may be needed by applying anti-slip surfaces, and cold store users, in particular, are at higher risks of slips if other devices are not used.
A good example of cold store floor hazards was a food storage company whose employee dislocated his hip while trying to dodge a pallet falling from the racking. There were actually two problems: build up of floor ice at door entrance and the use of plastic pallets which have less friction than wooden pallets. Workers were leaving the doors to the freezer open while going in and out on lift trucks, thus allowing warm air in, creating condensation and causing droplets to fall on the floor and turn to ice. Management was aware of the problem that stemmed from a poor safety management system and were fined £13,000 and ordered to pay costs of £2,516.
Structural problems with concrete floors can seriously impact worker productivity in various ways. It is not just potholes and deteriorating floor joints that cause trouble but also floor flatness. One Stuttgart-based company, for example, had problems with their VNA trucks bumping and shaking while travelling down the aisles. The poor standard of floor flatness meant the trucks had to work well below their designed speed, thus reducing productivity and raising truck maintenance. A new laser-based grinder from Concrete Grinding solved the problem with minimum disruption to warehouse operations.
The degree of damage caused by floor neglect can vary widely from the common to the almost bizarrely catastrophic. Forklifts have been known to skid on slippery surfaces and collide with racking, bad enough, one might think, but there is another problem – floor and other dust which when entrained in the air can cause disastrous explosions. This emphasises the need for good floor cleaning machines which keep warehouse dust content down. If there can be one adage that accurately applies to floor care it is that a stitch in time really works.
Warehouse & Logistics News
Comments are closed.