Perhaps the greatest challenge facing many UK loading bay operators is the need to comply with environmental issues and that largely revolves around energy consumption or losses. The industry has only six years to meet the demands of the 2011 Energy Act which will require all warehouses to have better than F or G energy certificates or else face closure. There are, of course, other important issues, like control of pest ingress, especially crucial in food and pharmaceutical concerns, and safe, efficient and ergonomic handling procedures on the bay, a notoriously high accident area. But it is the energy issue that is likely to concentrate minds most.
Leading loading bay equipment suppliers like Sara, Hormann and Stertil Stokvis offer energy audits of prospective clients’ premises free of charge and how their energy bills can be reduced by installation of the most appropriate equipment. Loading bay doors and their derivatives like inflatable dock shelters and air curtains are a key defence against heat loss.
The most popular of doors where vehicle traffic is very busy are the rapid roll PVC doors that can operate at up to 3 mt/sec. These, however, have to operate in conjunction with more solid doors for security reasons. A solution to this, however, is the fast-acting DPU sectional door from Hormann, a popular choice for temperature-controlled loading bays. It comprises double-skinned steel sections with a thermal break between the inner and outer faces which with the 80 mm polyurethane foam infill provides higher insulation levels as well as an adequate outer security door.
All these considerations must be handled at the design stage if best use is to be made of the loading bay but for the kit to continue at optimum use there must also be a robust maintenance programme in place. Sadly, and sometimes tragically, many loading bay operators have no regular maintenance scheme in place and prefer to rely on a reactionary response often handled by their own in-house maintenance engineers or some third party outfit that is unconnected with the equipment supplier. Both carry risks.
The safety picture, however, is improving. Alan Jenkins, Hormann’s commercial director, says his firm has noticed a greater emphasis on health and safety, not only at the design stage but more on the operational side, where additional safety features are being installed retrospectively. But there is no room for complacency because Britain still lags behind the rest of Europe when it comes to preventative maintenance. In Europe generally preventative maintenance costs are built into the cost of the goods for a one to three year agreements. This is largely due to the manufacturers guarantee and warranty clauses, whereby they will robustly invalidate the warranty unless a service agreement is in place. The same situation applies in the car industry where warranties on new cars will not be honoured by the manufacturer unless all servicing is done by their own approved dealers for the first three years or so. Loading bay operators, therefore, should be careful about doing their own maintenance on new equipment from day one.
Loading bay operators must always have one eye to the future because usage patterns on the bay could change as, for example, ‘green’ issues make themselves more intrusive. One of these issues concerns the pressing need to reduce carbon emissions by lorries and one effective way of doing that is to reduce freight miles run through the use of double-deck vehicles. These vehicles, however, pose deck height problems at the loading bay. There have been calls to change the height of loading docks to service the growth in double-deck trailer use but Easilift Loading Systems believes its Double-Dok kit, a blend of dock-levelling and lifting platform technology, presents a flexible solution to the changing usage patterns on the dock.
As Easilift MD, Rob Fay, explains, “the flexible gradient of the Double-Dok maintains a mutually supportive balance between dock, platform and vehicle to ensure a suitable working environrnent regardless of whether a single or double-deck vehicle is being loaded or unloaded.”
Best results for the most efficient loading bay operations will always be achieved by the use of leading loading bay equipment suppliers with a wide product portfolio. More than anybody else, especially architects, they know all the potential problems that lack of attention to detail can cause.
Warehouse & Logistics News
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