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Warehouse and Operations as a Career here, I’m Marty back with ya and I’d like to thank you for checking back in with us today. Oh my goodness, we received a lot of feed back from last weeks episode, It’s exciting to see so many of us working our plan towards that next promotion and doing so well with our Savings! It was great hearing that so many of us are actually putting more away than we’d discussed, some listeners wrote that they were doubling up their dollar amounts this first half of the year, that’ll just be that much more in the bank in week 52!
This week lets talk briefly about a few of the less know and operated pieces of equipment we’ll find in the warehouse, maybe lesser talked about tasks but vital to our well ran operations! An important task within the warehouse is keeping the floors clean. The warehouse is a dusty and grimy place. Boxes are dirty, pallets break, splinter, loose nails, they may have been stored outside in the elements at some point making them transport agents for no telling what! All the equipment we use have load wheels that leave tracks everywhere, and that hydraulic oil, maybe there’s no leak but somehow hydraulic oil is everywhere. I hate trying to wipe down my dashboard on a lift and find theirs that fine mist of oil on it, where’s all that stuff come from? And then of course we’re going to have those occasional spills that’ll of course be cleaned up immediately, or I hope they are, but as selectors and forklift drivers, do we really do a great job getting it all up? That’s why we have the experts on our shift, our sanitation departments, and one of there tools is the floor scrubber! The seated industrial warehouse floor scrubber is an amazing piece of equipment! You’ll see them in all sizes, units with 20” discs, 28”, 32”, 36”, and there’s many different scrubber pads available too. The reservoir tanks on these smaller units may hold something like 16 gallons, 21 gallons, even 28 gallons of water or cleaning solution and recovery tanks that’ll hold 11, 17, and 24 gallons. The larger units can be Sweepers and Scrubbers having dual discs, sometimes even 3 discs, a debris tank or bag for dust and dirt, they’ll even pick up small pieces of wood and cardboard and all those nails we leave laying around. A unit like this may have a clean reservoir tank of close to 80 gallons and a recovery tank that’ll pick up or hold something like 65 gallons! These units are awesome, you can make a pass through your facility, sweep all the floor and then go back through and scrub or clean the floors. There’s a lot of different manufacturers and probably thousands of models, I won’t mention any specific brands but you can search your browser using the words warehouse floor scrubber and get more results than you’d thought possible! And prices can range between 7k and 81k or so. There’s that much difference in their capabilities and all bells and whistles you can get.
These are a blast to drive, they can turn on a dime, the larger units can be a bit tricky but there all really work horses and will get the job done, I’ll add when used properly to that sentence I guess, When used properly they’ll certainly get the job done. I was fortunate enough to be trained on one of the largest units available at the time by probably one of the best Sanitation managers I’ve ever met. We were cleaning around 500k sq ft of racked area with a 65 foot deep dock area and we had several thousand feet of pedestrian traffic footage too. I felt like I mastered it’s sweeping function but the scrubbing and recovery part of it, I don’t think I ever did it properly, at least not like he could! He’d scrub that warehouse and leave the floor practically dry after he’d ran back over it with the squeegee. I’d leave little lines of water on the floor after every pass.
So how it works, well, the sweeping is pretty straight forward. The sweeping discs rotate with an uplifting motion towards a vacuum that sucks the debris into a big recovery bin inside, or on the back or side of the truck or unit. How good of job you do is going to be determined on the speed at which your running through your facility and how well you overlap your previous path. Pretty simple! But the scrubber function takes some skill. It’s one of those tasks you can’t fake your way through it, you’ve either done it before or your going to make a huge mess. I performed the task probably a thousand times and did it correctly maybe once. It all starts with the pre-trip, yes, every powered industrial unit should be given a pre-trip inspection, and with a sweeper/scrubber that pre-trip includes getting the unit ready to do its job. First, we need to make sure the debris bin is clean and properly seated to the vacuum hose, it has to be locked in place too, there’s a lot of suction being applied to it when we’re running through the warehouse. Next, we have to verify that the liquid recovery tank is clean, empty and there’s no leaks around the input hoses and vacuum attachment. A strong vacuum is going to be required to pick up all the solution we’ll be putting down on the floor. Next, we’ll need to fill our clean reservoir tank. We’ll usually be using some sort of cleaning solution, depending on our industry it could even be a strong chemical so proper mixing or dilution is critical for getting the job done and protecting ourselves and others. There’s some slick systems out there that can connect to our water source and pre-mixes and measures the exact quantities or ratios between solution and water as we’re filling the tank. Here’s a good place to remind everyone that this is a Powered Industrial Truck and will fall under the 29CFR1910.178 standard, we all know not to ever operate, get on or even touch a piece of powered warehouse equipment until we’ve been trained on it and understand all its safety concerns. That’s good solid advice for any type of machinery as well right? OK, so we’ve pre-tripped our sweeper/scrubber, filled it up with solution and we’re ready to get the job done! First, if the floor hasn’t already been swept we’ll run through the warehouse and sweep it. Sweeping is pretty easy, just lay out your path and make sure you overlap by an inch or two on each pass. My overlay had to be more like 8 to 10 inches, I couldn’t keep the unit moving in a straight line, a pro can literally make things work with an inch overlay, it’s all about keeping the truck running straight and true. We need to use some common sense, I mean we can’t try and run over something too large to vacuum up, small shards of pallets, nails and small pieces of cardboard can be vacuumed but for the larger pieces we have to climb down and pick them up to avoid clogging up our hoses or risking tearing up unit. Now we have a dust and debris free floor so we can start cleaning it. We’ll have a solution release lever, usually with 3 or 4 different preset stages that’ll be determined by how fast we’re moving through the warehouse and how strong our vacuum pressure is set. We’ll want to bring the unit to a stop, lower our squeegee bar, turn on the vacuum unit, engage the solution release and start our slow pace throughout the warehouse. When we’re really good at it we’ll leave no water streaks when turning, and when we’re really good at it there wont even be a pool of water left when we raise our squeeze to turn around or back up to reset our path. Its important to never back up with our squeegee down, it’ll rip it off the unit, I learned that the hard way, and those squeegee bars are expensive. There could be multiple squeegee bars too, the unit I learned on had 2 in the back and 1 on the right side, it helped when making wide left turns, or it help those that knew what they were doing, I always left lines, never could really master running these things.
As an order selector and forklift driver I’ve always thought our sanitation departments we’re those unsung heroes. Their work is hard, and they help us keep up our productivity by keeping our work areas and aisles clean so we can get those products pulled and shipped. There are so many skilled positions within sanitation, I never consider it as a general labor position. It is definitely a great position to get our foot in the door of a company we’d like to work for to!
Another piece of equipment every warehouse probably has, few of us may know where its kept though is the paint striper. Usually our Safety department keeps up with it although I’ve seen it kept back in the sanitation area before too, maybe because of the aerosol paint cans, they need to be segregated and kept in a vault locker for safety, so sometimes there kept by the professionals, those use to following the rules regarding chemicals and any dangerous stuff.
Here’s another piece of machinery I never mastered, had that same problem of not being able to keep a straight line again. The striper is used for painting the lines for our pedestrian walkways and outlining any keep away zones. You’d think anyone could accomplish this task, but I assure you its harder than it looks.
Now there’s powered units and push units. Most warehouses I visit own a small push unit to use inside the building for walkways and directional markings and pay a striping company to bring out the larger powered units to paint their parking lots and dock lines. The small units are fairly simple, you load a regular aerosol paint can into a slot on the lower end of the unit, the paint nozzle will have a couple of different settings, from line to about 5 inches wide lines. A roller wheel will be positioned to the right of the sprayer to help keep us straight and we’ll have a trigger on our handle for us to disperse paint as we’re pushing the unit over our pattern or chalk marks. Its always a good idea to lay out or mark on the floor where we want to place the paint. I have seen men paint perfect walkways without using any guides, there professionals. In my experience its usually a safety or sanitation person asked to go paint a walkway, I was an order selector the first time I was introduced to a striper unit. Didn’t use any chalk lines or draw out a path, hence my suggestion to do so. Cleaning up that paint and edging out the overspray wasn’t fun. Now I draw it out every time.
Well there’s a little on two pieces of equipment in the building that we see setting in a corner from time to time. I’ve used them both but never actually had the job title or worked in the department that was responsible for them. I asked my manager if I could be taught to use them and then I filled in when they needed to be used and was asked too. As you know I believe we should know a little about every task that touches ours and letting our bosses know we want to learn. More knowledge can’t hurt right?
Talking about knowledge and experiences I’m wanting to take a turret truck for a test drive, really bad. I’m going to find me one to drive! If your following our Facebook or Twitter feeds, where you can find us @whseandops, if you’re an operator share your experience with us, You can send us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com also and I’ll share it with the group! If your driving one let us know what you think of’em.
Until next week, be Safe and lets each learn something about a task that works beside us, and of course do it safely!