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Welcome to Week 10 of 2019 and to Episode 128 of Warehouse and Operations as a Career. I’m Marty T Hawkins and WAOC is in Orlando Florida today. I had an opportunity to visit a conference this week, I always enjoy seeing old friends in the industry and learning something new every day! Speaking of learning and being that we’re almost thru the 1st quarter, how’s everyone doing with their plans and goals? I’m pretty much on track with mine but I have made a couple of adjustments. I’m looking at where I spend my money and my time much closer than I use too. Going forward I’m going to pay much more attention to expense and what I’m willing to invest money or my time with. I’ll reach out to a few professionals in the industry and we’ll try and have another roundtable for the 1st quarter here in the next several weeks! So today I thought we could talk a little about the sanitation position. Warehouse sanitation is quite a bit different than Custodian or Janitorial jobs and can entail a broad range of responsibilities. We’ve received a couple of questions about the position this year and last week I had a long time listener, actually she was probably our 1st listener and I’m happy to say she’s caught every one of our episodes ask me when we’re we going to talk about Sanitation, she wanted to know what all duties and responsibilities it encompasses. I thought we’d just kind of walk through a typical day at a distribution center that I’m familiar with.
So, just like any light industrial position we’ll need to arrive to work early, we don’t want to be the tardy person and miss any start up or safety meetings. If we’re working for a smaller facility, say 50k to 150k square ft and racked warehouse one of our primary functions is going to be keep those front area trash cans empty and clean. Man, they can fill up quick with papers, little pieces of wood from broken pallets, maybe card board and shrink wrap coming from the unloaders, lumpers and receivers. Speaking of cardboard and shrink wrap. A lot of facilities today may be recycling, most of the buildings I visit each week have a bailer for their cardboard and shrink wrap that’s taken off the trailers and containers. It’ll be our job as sanitation to separate them out from the daily trash and compact them into bales using the bailer. A large facility may have separate compactors to keep up with the quantities coming off the docks. As with any recycling efforts it’s important that the item, cardboard, shrink wrap or even just non-confidential papers are clean and not wet or damp in any way. A bail can get pretty rank smelling if it has mildew or mold growing in it! Beside it being the right thing to do, why do companies spend the time, money and effort regarding recycling you might ask? Because there’s revenue in it and it can be well worth having the program. If your facility is not capturing that revenue, even if it’ll take a week to fill a trailer, typically 16 to 18 bails, I’d bring it up to your management team. An idea to bring in additional revenue vs paying someone to haul off such a large volume of trash is definitely going to get us noticed in a positive manner! Got side tracked for a second, anyway, so we’ve emptied all the trash cans, now we’ll hit the aisles checking for and cleaning up any spills, sweeping around or maybe under the pallets, we’d all be surprised at the amount of dust in our warehouses. Towards the end of the day we may have certain areas we’ll mop, at least the high traffic areas. I know one small facility where the 2-sanitation people will each clean around and under 1 dock plate a day. There’s 6 dock’s there so they cover each door around twice a week that way. Even our smaller facilities will have, or should have, a Master Sanitation Schedule or a Duty list, something that outlines all our duties. Now this isn’t a Job Description. Our master sanitation schedule will list the duties we’re expected to perform daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly. Whether we work for a small facility or an 800K warehouse we’ll be expected to follow this schedule, and it’s important for any audits from the city, state or federal agencies that may be visiting us from time to time. If your facility does not have or follow any type of schedule, put something together for your manager. Those are the kinds of things that’ll get us noticed! We’ve brought up something they will know we need to be doing and just made their job easier!
Let’s talk about those larger facilities now. Pretty much the same duties as our smaller buildings but on a grander scale, with many more employees so going forward we’ll try and speak to the task themselves.
I looked up an old master sanitation list I had, it’ll give us a pretty good sampling of the task that need to be performed.
Ok, on the daily list it has: There’s actually 58 items listed, a few of them are,
Sweep entire dock area after the second shift.
Empty all front dock and cross aisle trash cans
Compact all 2nd shift trash and debris
Clean and mop area around the trash compactor, at least twice daily.
Remove shrink wrap from bins and bale. This facility had a really good idea, they build large wooden bins or boxes where the order selectors and forklift drivers, and the night sanitation crew gather their used shrink wrap and fill them up. It really helped keep all that discarded shrink wrap off the floors and out of the aisles. Maybe something like that could work at your facility? Anyway, so then it has mop around the bailers twice a day.
It goes on to list Maintain all janitorial supplies in designated areas and properly marked, clean all spills as noticed or identified, Sweep all white lines daily, mop all white lines in cooler vault, drive scrubber in dry and cooler areas at end of shift, dust racking for cobwebs while in each aisle. I usually see this one on the monthly list, but our schedule will usually be built according to what the individual facilities needs are. It goes on to list, pick up the breakroom areas as needed and mop at end of shift. Clean and mop restrooms twice a day. Clean repack and salvage areas and mop twice a day. And it ends with spray down and clean or change dust mops at end of shift & empty trash cans and shrink wrap boxes at end of day.
The weekly duties are listed as: there’s 31 of them so I’ll highlight a few of them,
Pull pallets and sweep out from under them (rolling assignments) That means we’d do something a fifth of the aisles each day, so we’d have pulled and sweep them all by the end of the week! Clean under dock plates, remove wood chips and debris. (rolling assignment)
Dust light fixtures for cobwebs, clean as necessary. Clean pallet storage area, dust and mop. Clean and mop equipment charging area behind chargers. As you can see, every area of the warehouse, every square inch needs to be attended too each week.
The monthly schedule will get into some of the heavier or deeper cleaning tasks. This schedule has 22 things on it, like power wash under dock plates, power wash receiving ramp, scrub and sanitize fuel island. This one seemed a little over board to me, but it requires all light fixtures are to be wiped down with soap and water each month. Again, the monthly schedule will be that deep cleaning of the less traveled areas.
And then we have the Quarterly tasks: and there’s 17 items here, touch up any yellow floor lines. Paint all white line areas. Paint all bollard posts – new paint. Power wash cooler vault floor. Clean and bleach all vault drains.
And this master cleaning schedule has 3 Annual tasks also, power wash parking lots, touch up paint parking lines and dust and clean all ceiling rafters and sprinkler piping. That’s pretty through.
The sanitation position will teach us how to use chemicals properly, dilution rates, and really hone our time management skills. As you can see, sanitation is not just pushing a broom and emptying the trash. There’s a lot of responsibility that goes along with it. Our job performance is going to be reviewed by not only our bosses but possibly inspectors from the city, probably the fire marshal, the state auditor will probably be stopping by and depending on our industry we could see some federal agency coming in each year. Warehouse sanitation is a tough job, and one of those great opportunity positions. We’ll be working closely with and around every position in the warehouse! That exposes us to a lot of opportunity to learn other tasks, gives us that self-education to plan out our goals with! The sanitation position kind of wraps up my top three get our foot in the door tasks that are easy to get hired onto and can take us to the position we’re wanting to get too. And sanitation makes a fantastic career too. I just had a good friend retire after 31 years with a company. He hired on as a utility man in the sanitation department and retired as director of building maintenance with 2 supervisors and a cleaning crew 17 under his direction.
Well, there’s a little on the sanitation position and its responsibilities. I’ve always felt it’s a great opportunity position and can take us anywhere we’d like to go! Until next week, let’s all be on time, be productive and be safe out there!