Bonmarché, the UK’s largest value womenswear retailer for women aged 50+ years, has improved the safety of its loading and unloading operations with the adoption of Castell’s Salvo™.
The interlocking drive-away prevention system has been installed on all seven loading bays at Bonmarché’s Grange Moor head office, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Grange Moor, Bonmarché’s only distribution centre, handles an average of 140,000 garments a day, although this rises to 200,000 at peak times.
Historically, Bonmarché had safeguarded its loading bay activities through “people systems”, with relevant information being passed between the individuals concerned. But this arrangement was prone to misunderstandings. Most of the goods-in drivers were third-party, with some arriving from either Eastern Europe or Turkey. Since English was often not their first language, and sometimes not even their second, instructions could easily be misinterpreted, with potentially fatal consequences.
This led to several instances of drivers departing from a loading bay prematurely, in what is known as a “drive-away”. However, drive-aways were not solely caused by linguistic confusion. They also occurred in Bonmarché’s despatch area, which was entirely staffed by the company’s own drivers.
Several incidents in which employees were injured, plus other instances of vehicles moving prematurely, convinced Bonmarché of the need to add an extra level of safety to both its goods-in and goods-out operations.
“The incidents were quite infrequent,” says Tony Thompson, Bonmarchés head of logistics, “but we couldn’t stop them happening infrequently. We didn’t have that mechanical control.”
Martin Davies, health & safety manager, takes up the point: “The risk was too great. We’d tried all the people systems and now it was time to recognise that the only way we were going to stop it was with a physical system.”
Following their own research and a personal recommendation, Tony and Martin quickly identified Salvo™ as the potential solution to their problem.
Nevertheless, to ensure that all options had been fully considered, they then spent a week searching for alternative systems, eventually concluding that there was nothing comparable available on the market. They decided that the significantly larger investment needed to install wheel restraints at Grange Moor could not be justified, since Salvo™’s ability to separate and control door and vehicle movements was sufficient for the task in hand.
Logistics trainer Andy Stocks initially introduced Salvo™ to 10 colleagues at line manager level and invited their feedback. Bonmarché then spent more than a month training its staff on the correct way to use Salvo™, and twice postponed commissioning the new system because it was not satisfied that the training programme had been fully completed.
“We invested in it properly, through training as well as capital expenditure,” Andy explains. “That’s why the result we got was a very good one, because we took the time to implement it correctly.”
Third-party drivers arriving at Grange Moor report to security and receive documentation explaining how the Salvo™ system operates. They park in a holding area, where they are met by a supervisor who checks that they understand the information they have been given. Drivers are then asked to reverse into a particular loading bay, before disengaging their engine and fitting either a Salvo™ Susie or SGL lock to their vehicle’s exposed emergency airline coupling. This action effectively immobilises the trailer and releases a key, which the driver hands to a member of the warehouse staff. Inserting and turning the key in the control panel located next to the bay door powers up the bay and enables the door to be raised. Once the dock leveller has been correctly positioned, the driver is asked to pull the cab away, park in the holding area and wait there until further notice while unloading takes place.
Bonmarché supplements the Salvo™ system with wheel chocks, traffic lights and cones placed in front of vehicles. For rigid vehicles, the company has also purchased seven Salvo™ Clubs, an interlocking steering wheel lock.
The Health & Safety Executive booklet ‘Warehousing and storage: A guide to health and safety’ recommends interlocks as a safe system of work to combat drive-aways. Salvo™ also features as an example of a safe system of work in the Freight Transport Association’s ‘Loading dock safety guide’, produced in conjunction with the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health.
Castell Safety International Ltd
Jason Reed
Tel: 020 8200 1200
Email: jreed@castell.com
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