Reduce accidents and injuries in warehouses

How goods lifts can reduce potential workplace accidents in warehouses

Warehouse owners around the world are increasingly interested in enhancing the safety of their employees, equipment, and goods. Lifting injuries from common tasks in warehouses, such as picking up and moving heavy items, are among the top three causes of employee injuries in warehouses worldwide.

Why you should make safety a priority in your warehouse

The most common cause of workplace accidents is manual handling. Repetitive lifting or lifting items too heavy are potential hazards, not only endangering the safety of human workforce but also ongoing processes in warehouses or distribution centres. In the long run it may even endanger the smooth running of productions. Additionally, a shortage of skilled workers due to injuries may lead to potentially high expenses for any company. Can forklifts be a safe alternative for companies to reduce potential accidents and avoid high costs or are goods lifts the better way to make warehouses a safer workplace?

Forklifts – alternative or potential hazard?

To introduce a level of automation in warehouses, forklifts are often the first step. Apart from manual lifting, forklifts represent another high potential source of accidents in the warehouse for staff. Training is required on correct techniques, otherwise serious injuries could result and stored goods may be damaged. To make use of forklifts in storage spaces a good training and licenses are needed. Warehouse staff needs to learn the correct way of using forklifts, including processes such as loading and unloading goods, transporting these and manoeuvring inside the often tight warehouse spaces. In addition to costly and time-consuming measures such as intensive trainings, lots of space is required to be able to safely implement forklifts as transportation mode. Consequently, available space is missing or rather used for transportation routes. Thus it can become an even bigger challenge to store goods and address the rising demands.

How goods lifts can improve the safety of your warehouse

An efficient and safe way to decrease both, potential hazards in manual lifting or the usage of forklifts, is the installation of goods lifts in your warehouse.
Fast transportation of heavy and bulky items is guaranteed, without exposing staff to potential health dangers.
In addition, the usage of goods lifts can significantly reduce the potential for goods damage. Accidents and manoeuvring in tight warehouses can be avoided.
There is no need for cost-intensive training and licenses.
The installation of goods lifts will increase workflows and efficiency inside warehouses and automatically free staff for other for higher valued tasks.
Moreover, heavy items can be transported to various levels without effort. The available space can be fully used to store additional goods across several floors.
In warehouses where goods are stored on one level only, goods lifts can easily be retrofitted without needing structural changes.

The choice is yours

Even if forklift trucks cannot be dispensed with in specific processes, a combination of both, goods lifts and forklifts, can improve the overall safety for staff. Installing a goods lifts will reduce the overall traffic of forklifts and reduce transportation routes. Creating several storage floors with the help of goods lifts will therefore not only make warehouses more flexible but also less busy. The total traffic is easily distributed on each level, minimizing the number of potential collisions and accidents.

Conclusively, it can be said that warehouse safety is an important issue. A topic that is easy to be improved regardless of the given building structure. Make your warehouse now safer for your staff and the safe storage of goods.