Best practice: Planning warehouse safety & efficiency

Managing change for a safe and efficient warehouse

Warehouse safety and efficiency are very closely related, and most businesses aspire to both. So how do the best companies achieve high levels of performance when the environment itself is under constant and often unexpected change?

Gay Sutton reports.

Step into the densely packed interior of a third party logistics provider or, in fact, into almost any warehouse and what do you find? An environment that is under continuous evolution – continuous change. Warehouse managers need to be problem solvers, but planning for change can make an enormous difference, mitigating many of the problems they face, and ensuring the operation is as safe and efficient as possible.

“Warehouse managers need to be problem solvers, but planning for change can make an enormous difference, mitigating many of the problems they face, and ensuring the operation is safer and as efficient as possible.”

In many ways, major change is easier to handle. Refurbishing a building, stripping out the old racking and installing new, or introducing a new picking system, can provide a marvellous opportunity to redesign the facility for the greatest efficiency and safety. Expert advisors supported by an internal advisory team can create a highly efficient storage and working space, capable of adapting to future change, performing extremely well with the current workload, and conforming to the highest standards and legislation.

“You only need to look at the cost effectiveness of safety to see that it goes hand in hand with improved efficiency and performance,” said Roger Bibbings of RoSPA. “In recession it may seem quite counterintuitive, but the business case for safety is stronger than it is in more buoyant times because you haven’t got the sales and turnover to make good the losses that you suffer. You only have to avoid relatively few accidents for safety measures to pay for themselves several times over.”

“You only need to look at the cost effectiveness of safety to see that it goes hand in hand with improved efficiency and performance.”

Roger Bibbings, RoSPA

When undertaking a major redesign, however, Bibbings did warn that professional warehouse designers can be a bit remote from the realities of the work environment they are designing. So by providing a small advisory team from the warehouse that includes an experienced supervisor, safety rep and someone from the management team, the designer should be able to address many of the safety and efficiency issues in that working environment. “It may consume time,” Bibbings admitted, “but the designers will receive an authentic reflection of the problems with the existing setup, and can design a solution that addresses those.”

“When undertaking a major redesign, however, Bibbings did warn that professional warehouse designers can be a bit remote from the realities of the work environment they are designing.”

The unexpected

These larger scale changes can be easier to initiate, design and manage than the continuous day to day changes that take place in the modern warehouse. And these latter demand a very vigilant eye and quick response if safety and efficiency are to be maintained.

“The world I work in is third-party logistics,” said Steve Clark chairman of the retail and distribution group at IOSH. “We do business with the likes of Amazon and Sainsbury, and run warehouses for them.” All the recognised safety practices for the handling and storage of products are strictly adhered to. But one of the challenges of this type of operation is the unexpected.

Large organisations dealing with millions of products will inevitably send materials or products to the warehouse that are totally unexpected, and the surprise might be that familiar products are packaged in a very different way than expected and will require a different method of handling and storage. Or perhaps the surprise is in the nature of the goods themselves. “For example, in a food warehouse, some cake decorations now resemble Roman candles and are therefore classed as explosives,” Clark explained. “Other food products may come in aerosol cans, which are not normally seen in the food sector. A whole raft of legislation applies to both of these, and they represent hazards and risk that have to be managed.”

Communication matters

Clark prepares for the unexpected in two ways. Firstly, he believes it is essential to build a close long term relationship with the customer. As part of the contract tendering process, there would have been a thorough exchange of details on the products, stock keeping and skus, in order to identify how the goods should be handled, and how and where they should be stored within the facility.

Continuing communication with the customer is then critical, if the warehouse is to be notified of changes and can prepare: examine the handling processes and storage requirements, undertake a risk assessment, and implement the necessary controls and training before the first consignment of new items arrives.

Contingency planning

Even the best customer, however, may not be aware of the hazards and risks a new product or change in packaging poses. For example, the explosive candles mentioned above may have been documented throughout as cake decoration. For the warehouse manager, this can be the most difficult thing to spot and deal with quickly and safely. Clark’s approach is to ensure his warehouse staff are trained and empowered to identify and flag up hazards and issues in the products they handle. “Your front-line staff are often the first to see a hazard while management are unaware of it, perhaps because it has a completely innocuous name.”

Bibbings reinforces this view, and takes the concept in another direction, emphasizing the importance of the frontline staff in initiating any change and improvement in warehouse safety and efficiency. “When it comes to safety, the workforce is a great mine of information. Regarding them as an entirely passive resource that has to fit in with the plan that’s being developed is wasting an opportunity to tap into the knowledge which you’d otherwise pay consultants tens of thousands of pounds for,” he said.

“When it comes to safety, the workforce is a great mine of information.”

“So part of the challenge for effective management is to get people to surface their concerns and suggestions in a positive way,” he continued. And this is exactly how Clark handles the unexpected, expecting and relying on his staff to highlight problems immediately.

Spotting incremental change

Supporting this direct and immediate action from frontline staff, Clark says it is important to establish an auditing inspection regime. And this can help pick up on the cumulative effect of incremental change. “You can’t audit everybody all the time, but a risk based audit program can pick up on deficiencies and you can then correct those. And where things are work well you might look to improve them.”

“Nothing stands still,” Bibbings said. “Sometimes even small changes are ‘latent pathogens’, as we say, which means they can store up problems that you don’t realise at the time, and lead to issues later on. So it’s a matter of looking far enough ahead and having enough flexibility in your system to adapt from one set of circumstances to another.”

Clark believes that bringing in a ‘new pair of eyes’ to look around the warehouse on a regular basis can often highlight issues Safety that are surfacing from cumulative change, which internal staff have not yet identified as warranting change.

Finally, the quality of supervision throughout the warehouse is very important if new procedures are to be implemented successfully. “It’s no good just training your forklift drivers or pickers to change,” Clark said. “It’s vital to ensure those who are going to supervise them are also fully trained to the change and understand what management of risk is required for that change, and this is something that is unfortunately often overlooked.”

Looking beyond the warehouse walls

There is much that can be learned across often very dissimilar industries. “I’m a great advocate of business to business learning,” Bibbings concluded, “and thankfully there is a great willingness among people to share knowledge and information about safety. So I would say companies need to be benchmarking with each other, taking part in forums and social networking and listen to the grapevine, learning from accidents elsewhere. Then you can forestall problems before they happen.”