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Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career here, lets see, what do we have for this week. I wanted to talk about putaway today. The putaway positions came up the last couple of shows, and we’ve learned how close the task is linked to the receiving functions and runner positions but we haven’t discussed it’s function just yet so todays the day!
Ok, a little about the putaway task. It’s a forklift position, and usually we’re going to have a bit of experience on the lift as it’ll be a productivity position. Now in a very small warehouse, and we could be responsible for putting product away, but we’re probably going to hold the position of forklift driver. Putaway, when referred to as a position, our sole duty will be to store and rack product. Typically, there’s going to be 3 or more forklifts running at a time for the position to be called anything other than forklift. I’m talking about dedicated forklift drivers doing nothing other than hauling product from the dock, unless our facility is utilizing pallet runners, or picking up pallets from the aisle and placing them in the pick slots or up in the reserve slots. We’ve looked into the day in the life of a few positions over the last few weeks so let’s stick to the format today as we discuss the Putaway position.
We’ll arrive for work a few minutes early of course, remember we don’t want to be late or tardy, plus we want to sit down for a minute. Relax, maybe have a coffee or soda, and visit with our team mates. We’ll want to do any catching up now rather than waste our productivity time in the aisles talking instead of working and hauling! In my experience we’ll go ahead and punch in and head on back to the equipment area, unplug our lift, do our pre-trip equipment condition report and drop it off in the maintenance department or where ever we’ve been instructed to do so. I always kept a copy of mine, at least the ones where I had marked a dent or paint missing, something the previous shift should have mentioned on their post shift report but maybe just had forgotten about. Now I never was one of those that wiped down the plexi windshield, or my control handle or steering wheel. I pretty much just checked it out, got on it and was ready to go to work. Oh, I’d check it for little paint touch up’s, I mean I always wanted it to look nice but I didn’t keep it as clean as I should have maybe. I had the one gentleman working for me for years, he had a bottle of Windex and a can of Lysol that he kept in his locker. He literally wiped his lift down every day, he even had purchased a little bottle of touch up paint from the manufacturer, both red and black to cover up even the tiniest scratches. I have to admit, his lift looked better than any of the others. He had the best productivity of all of us too, don’t know if there was any correlation but I’ll admit him and his lift usually out performed me and mine. Anyway, now we’ll head on over to the start up meeting. I think its even more important for us as lift drivers to stretch out our muscles, get that blood moving around at the beginning of the shift. My first putaway assignment was on a Hyster counterbalance, a sit down lift. I always made it a point to get off of the lift like once an hour just to stand up and move around a little. Sitting and driving and racking pallets for 10 hours is a little rough on your body, you get to feeling it after about an hour or so. When I switched to the standup reach lift, I found just the opposite, now I wanted to sit down sometime. So, since our goal’s here at WAOC is to get noticed let’s have something to contribute at every meeting, at least make a comment or bring up something about safety. It might be the last time we’ll be seeing our supervisor all shift, if we’re doing our jobs right that is. So, now we’re ready to start our shift, we’ll head to the dock or our aisles, which ever process our facility has lined out for us. Let’s talk about hauling off the dock first. This process is where the unloaders have stacked the product onto pallets and moved them to the staging area for the receiver to tag them or receive it and it’ll be our job to grab them and get it to the aisle to put it away, hence the title of putaway driver. As we’ve learned, the front docks are the busiest area of the warehouse and the most prone for accidents. Last week we talked about how all the equipment, pedestrian and driver traffic makes for a dangerous situation. We have to be even more focused and aware of our surrounds when we’re up on the docks moving around on our equipment. Just today I was told about an incident between a forklift and a pallet jack, hang on, I’ll talk about that in a minute, there I go losing focus while talking about the front docks. Ok, like I was saying it’ll be our responsibility to keep the rows of tagged pallets moving so the unloaders can keep bringing freight out of the trailers and the receivers can keep tagging the freight. We have to make sure they have room to work. Today most warehouses will be using a WMS system or warehouse management system to track the inventory. Us as putaway drivers may have to scan the tagged pallet when we pick it up and confirm our putaway by scanning the slot tag when we drop it off. The system will instruct us where it goes, the pick slot or a reserve location. We’ll be working closely with the unloaders and receivers, we’ll all need to get along. If were working in sync, the day will fly by, we’ll be productive, we’ll all make good money and it’ll be a Safe day!
The other process is quite a bit different. I see this in our higher volume warehouses, again productivity drives a lot of the procedures we see in warehousing. We’ve talked about how travel time is a bad thing when it comes to productivity. If we as fork drivers are driving without a load, like running up to the docks empty, we’re not making any money and not racking the company’s product. When you have 3 or 4 thousand pallets to get into the racks in a 8 hour shift you’ve got to cut out as much travel time as you can. This is where our facility may utilize pallet runners to bring the palletized product from the docks and place it in our assigned aisles for us. Every operator I know works their aisles a little differently. I never cared for my runners dropping the pallets right in front of the slot range. I preferred they get it within a bay or two of the slot. I liked having a little room to work, I liked planning out my lifts and it helped me to keep my aisles organized. I see fork operators go off on runners for placing it wrong in their aisles, never made sense to me. If I was a runner, and you screamed at me, you could bet that the next load was going to be placed just like the last one. When your working the aisles as a lift operator, make sure your runner is your friend. The day your going to have will depend on them.
Every putaway position that I can think of is a productivity position and is on some type of price per pallet pay or an hourly base program with an incentive per pallet. Remember, the putaway position is going to be found in our larger operations, productivity is what our company is going to be paying for. This isn’t going to be a position we’ll be hired on for, we’ll have to have some experience in order to produce at the level needed and probably expected! Putaway is a great position, I loved my years on the lift. It’s a task we have to treat with respect though, we have to be focused and aware of our surrounds at all times. We have to be Safe, for ourselves and those around us as well!
I mentioned an incident that’d been communicated to me earlier today. An unloader was running a pallet over to the front of the cooler vault to stage it. This particular facility has a receiving office that sits up against the wall of the vault creating a bit of a blind spot if one is coming across the dock from the other end. Sure enough, a forklift was coming down the dock, he had a clear view of what was in front of him and the dock door area and was admittedly going a little too fast approaching the receiving office area. Our unloader dropped his pallet and was heading back to his trailer, just clearing the corner of the receiving office as the forklift was approaching the same corner. Yep, the collision happened. Thankfully no one was hurt, they’d both heard and seen the other one so both had a second to slow down and the impact wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Horns people be aware of your situations and surroundings. And use our horns. It’s hard, we’re on our equipment for long periods of time and we have a job to get done. Please stay focused though, that’s our number 1 job.
Well, that’s a little on the putaway position, I hope I answered a question or two. If not please email us host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and I’ll get you an answer. Until next week, remember that our jobs can be dangerous, lets all take care of each other and use those horns!