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Welcome back and thanks for checking in with us, I’m Marty and you’ve chosen to listen in to Warehouse and Operations as a Career today and we very much appreciate your time! I’m in Las Vegas, Nevada this week, doing a pre site Safety walk at a new facility. I really enjoy having the opportunity to meet with new customers and all their associates. It’s a quite large facility, about 500k sq ft building, a production warehouse actually. I probably spend more time in Distribution Centers, I’ve always felt the production side of our industry is a great place work though, I actually think it’s the perfect environment to get started with, and they can offer us some great and long lasting careers too!
I’ve done a little research on a few pieces of equipment that I’d like to talk about today. You’ll typically see all the standard material handling or powered industrial equipment in both production and distribution centers. Pallet jacks, stand up lifts, reach forks and the counterbalance lifts moving freight across the docks. I seem to see the more specialized units or trucks around production facilities so let’s look at a couple. I’ll put a few URL’s in today’s show notes in case you’d like to check’em out, maybe learn a little more about their uses. Hey, what’d ya’ll think about us making a WAOC YouTube channel so we could share some pics and slides of the things we discuss, maybe we wouldn’t use it weekly but it could be another avenue for us to learn with? Send us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com, let me know if that’s something you’d like to see. Maybe I could learn a little about video!
Let’s talk about the Order Picker for a minute. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been asked about them 4 times so let’s learn a little about them! I was talking with an order selector a few weeks ago, he had found himself a great job as an order selector, he’d been looking for a while and was just recently hired on. He’d wanted a productivity position with a triple rider jack and he’d found it and was loving it! Just before this position landed in his lap he had accepted an order picker position only to find on his first night that the recruiter had been talking about a piece of equipment instead of a position. Listening to his story I thought I’d bust my spleen laughing so hard. He’d gone in, went through 2 hours of orientation and was taken out to the floor where he found out he’d be operating an actual order picker. What made the story so funny was listening to him talk about how afraid of heights he was and his panic attack he experienced when he stepped on the platform of the lift. I’ve heard the Order Picker called a cherry picker, a hi/lo, a platform truck and a high rise truck and I’m sure there’s several other names used for it. If you go to the https://www.raymondcorp.com/lift-trucks/orderpickers to purchase what we old high rise selectors call a cherry picker you’ll find it listed as an order picker. Same thing with Crown Equipment, https://www.crown.com/en-us/forklifts/sp-stockpicker.html you’ll be looking for an order picker. You all know Joe, our WAOC Safety expert, when I want to upset him I’ll just call an order picker a cherry picker. I work with a lot of Recruiters through the many different job boards across the nation and I’ve decided what we call equipment is very much a regional thing. And of course, we as employees tend to use the phrases that our management uses, and I think they may just be carrying on traditions with what they were taught to call them!
We can checkout https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/order-pickers/ for a great definition of the order picker. Basically it is a unit where we stand on the operators platform with a set of forks behind the driving compartment used to attach a pallet for us to place cases, units or pieces of our orders on during selection. Its used in narrow aisle situations with many pick locations where several SKU’s or small products are carried or stored by our company. Some order pickers can take us as high as 32 feet to perform our task. I’ve mentioned before this was one of the first powered industrial trucks I drove, I loved my Cherry picker truck back in the high rise department I started in. I know Joe’s wrenching right now that I said it that way. And I’ve got to admit I was surprised to learn that an actual cherry picker, if you went to buy one today, or entered it into our Google search bar would be what I always called a boom lift. Going back to https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/order-pickers/ we’ll learn that the name came from one of its first uses was for picking fruit, not just cherries, from the higher branches. With it having a platform or cage that we can be raised with while controlling where we want to go it was perfect for working out in the fields. I see them being used more these days by the maintenance department for building racking, installing in-rack sprinkler systems and changing light bulbs in the warehouses.
Speaking of our maintenance departments, another typical lift we could find in our warehouse would be the scissor lift. Check out https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/scissor-lift/ It’s just a platform, with rails on all sides, I guess you could call it a cage, where again we as operators are taken to where the work is. One difference with this piece of equipment is that it’s built to go straight up and down. It’s a very narrow truck, not really built for balance. Our Safety practices actually forbid it being moved forward or backward while raised.
Oh, and I almost forgot about one of my favorite pieces of equipment, the turret truck. It’s the one piece of warehousing equipment or lift that I’m not certified on. I want to operate one so bad! So back to https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/turret-trucks/ we go. We’ve been talking about platform trucks that raise us up to the tasks but we as selectors or employees are kind of manually performing the tasks. A turret truck is actually a forklift that we’re riding up with the forks. It has an articulating carriage allowing the forks to rotate 180 degrees within the aisle with us. This baby is for use in very narrow aisles. The ones I’ve seen can take us up in the carriage to like 40 feet to place or retrieve a pallet. A wired guidance system is usually used to guide the truck down the aisles so the operator can concentrate and focus on the pallets. If any of you operate one of these beast shoot us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and tell us about your experiences with it, I’d be so jealous to hear about it!
All four of these pieces of equipment fall under the term AWP, or aerial work platform. I’ve sometimes heard the term EWP or elevated work platform. If we check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_work_platform we’ll find it states an aerial work platform (AWP), also known as an aerial device, elevating work platform (EWP), bucket truck or mobile elevating work platform (MEWP) is a mechanical device used to provide temporary access for people or equipment to inaccessible areas, usually at height. There are distinct types of mechanized access platforms. I found their definition pretty interesting, you should check out the whole thing, there’s several really good links within it too.
Of course anytime our feet leaves the ground we should, or I hope we do, think of our Safety and the Safety of others. Many years ago all I wore regarding PPE’s to work from my old cherry picker in the high rise department was a safety belt. Every time I’d step in the platform I’d put on my belt which stayed attached to a lanyard which was affixed to the headache bar on the truck. We used to joke, it wouldn’t have ever really been funny had we stepped off the platform or pallet, but we’d joke around how after free falling for 4 feet until our straight and unforgiving lanyards caught us, how that belt would end up yanking all our organs out. A few years later the full body harnesses came out with retractable lanyards which offered us much better fall protection. And here’s a great opportunity for me to mention my favorite Safety procedure, awe come on, you knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to again state to never get on or operate any type of powered industrial truck or machine of any kind without being properly trained and certified to do so. Our 29cfr1910.178 training teaches us that right. And as always I’ll add it’s link to todays show notes, it has a great search field on the page where you can check out just about anything covered within the regulation or standard! https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owalink.query_links?src_doc_type=INTERPRETATIONS&src_unique_file=I20000410A&src_anchor_name=1910.178(l)(2)(ii)
I strayed a little off topic again but it never hurts to bring up safety, it is our Priority One right?
Distribution Centers use to utilize order pickers quite a bit but now I think I’m seeing them more practical for production facilities. DC’s seem to be going to the mechanical options like product carousels, mini loads and conveyor systems, even robots for their small wares or lighter, more uniformed products. As I mentioned I work with several recruiters, many whom has never had the opportunity to see a lot of the equipment we work with and I always suggest them checking out equipment on you tube before they interview an operator. If your new to the industry and think you’d like to become an equipment operator you should check out my friend’s channel. Just look up Raymond Harlall on you tube, he’s got several videos on the operation of all types of equipment. He has a great one on the order picker! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k01FC9JRgC8
Well, I hope we helped define a few pieces of equipment for you today. If your facility doesn’t train you to the reg 29cfr1910.178 please mention it to your boss, he or she may just not be aware of it. It’ll get you noticed in a good way and keep you and your co-workers a bit safer. Until next week, please think safe & be safe, both at work and at home!