It’s important for persons who have their businesses operating with a warehouse to know and understand racking safety measures. Employees need to feel like their company values their safety. The racking system is essential to your business. It can increase the rate of production, makes retrieving of materials easy, and serves as appropriate storage spaces. But for it to remain functional, it’s necessary that you are well versed with racking safety awareness. Here is a guide to help you out with that.
Racking system limitations
Your racks come with limitations, but it’s unfortunate that many people only pay attention to the weight and ignore other constraints. If you want to know how much a company can produce, you got to find out the company’s production possibilities frontier. The same case applies to rack safety. Individuals need to calculate the racking storage possibilities storage frontier.
Certain kinds of racking can store more than other types. It’s therefore essential that you determine how much load your racks can carry depending on its kind. For instance, some kinds of pallet racking can handle more weight than other types of cantilever racking. Before installing a racking system in your warehouse, ask yourself, how much will my company be producing on a daily basis? And will those particular racks be able to store the produced items?
Racking inspections and training
Laws on racking inspections differ depending on the country. But, the idea is just the same in most states. In the U.S for instance, OSHA can inspect your racking system or recommend a private organization to do that. And in the UK, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommends that racking to be inspected at least once in every year by a SARI (SEMA approved rack inspector).
If you’re nervous about the upcoming inspections, that is not a good sign. Bear in mind that these inspections are there to assess how safe your storage units are. So, if you are worried, then it’s probably because your racks aren’t safe. But rather than waiting until it’s too late you can take racking safety and inspections into your own hands and enroll for racking inspection training.
Racking inspections training qualifies you and your employees to inspect the racking yourselves. In the U.S once you undertake this training and have been qualified for the Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP), you can stop surprise visits from OSHA.
The layout of your racking system
As we’ve earlier said, not all racking is the same. It’s therefore wise that you dedicate some time to research different storage solutions available in the market before you begin your production. Just as you spend weeks and even up to months, thinking of how you want your shop to be laid out, you should also do the same when it comes to the layout of your warehouse. Your racking system should reflect on the growth or shrinking of your business. The last thing you should do is to overload your racking. Overloaded racks are inconvenient, inefficient as well as hard to use. And worse, overloaded racking is dangerous.
Racking safety awareness is simply a matter of knowing your racks and understanding how to use them best to minimize or completely avoid accidents. It requires knowledge, patience, and hard work, which are values you already have since you’ve started your business. Great racking safety translates to a great enterprise.