Practices to ensure safe material handling

1. Practices to ensure safe material handling!

2. INTRODUCTION • A warehouse is a place that stores a lot of heave goods, generally referred to as materials. This blog talks about tips for a safer experience in the material handling process. Safety under material handling is important as it deals with a lot important tools, materials and goods. With it being such an important factor to the process of manufacturing and storing goods, safety becomes one of the key factors that have to be taken care of. So, here are some tips on how to ensure a safe material handling process:

3. Make information visible • Laminate sheets with tips and pointers for the team printed on them and put them up all over the warehouse. This will help a worker that is looking for some tip on how to run a certain machine. They can quickly refer to the poster next to them and continue with the work without any stoppages, it will consume a lot of time if they have to look through their handbook or try to recall them on their own.

4. Organize the traffic • If you have a big warehouse, you will also have a lot of equipments to handle and move around. And even if the warehouse is huge the lanes in between the storage racks are generally small. You are hence confined to a limited space to move the storage goods. Maintain a few rules for the traffic and make sure the workers follow these rules to avoid accidents and damage to the good and the workers.

5. Placement is key • You will have a lot of different types of shipments and storage goods that you will have to stack around the warehouse. Stack these smartly and you will end up saving a lot of time while easing the process as well. Place the shipments that are used often, in the racks close to the exit so that they don’t have to travel a lot. Place the ones that are to be handled manually at a suitable height, preferably a height which can be reached with the use of a small ladder.

6. Educate the workers on a regular basis • The workers will put in a lot of physical strength to move the heavy shipments and storage goods; what they might not understand is the pressure that they are putting on important parts of their body. A worker might use his hands to lift a heavy storage item but it would actually affect his lower back as that is where the pressure would be going, and the worker would not be aware of this. The manager can conduct workshops and educate the workers about this and maybe provide a recap on basics of how to tread around the warehouse.

7. Singular authority, less damage • When moving heavy stuff around the warehouse or transporting them from one station to another with the help of a sling rope, it is pivotal to have a single person tendering commands. The accidents in such a case can be drastic and have major impacts. If there are a lot of people tendering commands to the operator, the probability of an accident are higher as compared to a single instructor. So, to ensure that such accidents and confusions do not occur, it is important to have a single authority

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