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Welcome to all, Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career, everyone having a productive and prosperous week, I hope! This week I was giving a class on Forklifts and Material Handling to a group of ladies and gentlemen that had never been in the warehouse before. That sounded strange, the class was about career possibilities and the forklift was just the first position and where we could go from there was what we’d be learning about. One of the things everyone noticed was the recurring theme of safety and focus, and how the word responsibility seemed to be in every other paragraph!
If we’ve worked in a mall or retail environments or maybe the restaurant industry, I could see how many things our industry considers an employees responsibility could be thought of as picky and almost harassment if they we’re brought up.
One such thing that comes to mind is attendance and being tardy. I hear about someone who forgot to punch in or out and receiving a short check almost every week. The associate is downright upset and mad. But it was there fault! I’ve had people tell me it’s payrolls job to check their times before they pay them. Its not! Luckily, sometimes they do catch it, but how can we be mad at them if they don’t. Oh, and how about calling in on a busy day! In a retail or restaurant environment there are people to call if we don’t show up. I mean there may be 10 of us working 20 hours a week instead of 5 people working 40 hours. And those schedules work for many of us and it works for that industry. In our world, we being equipment operators or trained to run a machine or how a particular truck is to be loaded, we’re not quite as replaceable for our shift!
Think back to when you were a new boot! What all did you wish someone had told you about what we do, or about your position now! I know I have a lot of advice I’d give the younger Marty today!
So, one of the things I got the sense no one was understanding, or grasping was the responsibilities parts. I understand that there’s a lot of dangers in the warehouse, and I think those responsibilities were understood. When I started talking about pre-trip reporting, post trip sheets, signing out for powered industrial trucks, our start-up meetings, etc I felt like I had lost them.
Now this was a very engaged group, everyone participated, asking questions and genuinely cared about learning something new.
After the class I thought I’d go over to some social media sites and pose a couple of questions, see what some other equipment operators and warehousemen thought would be a good core group of thoughts to share with people entering the industry. I thought I’d share a few things they shared with me today! And if you have any things you wish you’d of known before jumping into the industry, send me an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com , I bet a lot of us had some of the same ideas!
One of the top 3 things brought up was people wished they had known more about General Maintenance Practices or GMP’s of warehousing and a few SOP’s or Standard Operating Procedures that every warehouse should be using in its day to day operations. Here’s a couple of things off the top of my head, and a few comments a few others had on the subjects. I looked back into the WAOC archives and found a few thoughts as well!
Simply put GMP’s are practices required in order to conform to the guidelines recommended by agencies that control or oversee the sale of food products, drug products and work environments as well as several other regulated industries. Many companies get very detailed here and you’ll find they may be much more organized, clean & proficient than the ones that only write down and document the bare minimums. Some of the replies came from within the Foodservice Distribution arena so let’s speak to a few used in that industry. The FDA & USDA will be the two primary agencies you’ll hear about, along with your Local City & State agencies. Your facility may utilize third party companies such as AIB or BRC to come in once or twice a year to perform a mock audit, this is a good thing as it prepares you for or identifies any deficiencies that may be present before the scheduled or surprise visit by another agency. There being paid to train you and give you a grade, so you know how you’re doing as an organization. Don’t be afraid of any of these regulatory agencies but do respect them, they will be very informational and fair with you. They are there to ensure our food and drug products are safe and wholesome & they work hard to hold us to high standards. If you’re not part of the responsible teams involved with Audits or preparing for audits get with you management team and let them know you’re interested in helping out, it’s all about learning and getting noticed right! Let’s talk about some pretty standard GMP’s that should be in place and documented at every warehousing facility. I say documented as that’s 90% of what GMP’s are, it’s the stated policy and then documented that it’s been explained to you and documented that those rules are being followed.
Your company should have covered a few general things with you and probably had you sign a sheet of paper listing the do’s and don’ts if you will such as:
No gum chewing or using mints or candy in the warehouse
No glass containers outside of the breakroom
No soda’s or sugary drinks on the warehouse floor
No civilian or personal jackets outside the locker room
No lunch containers outside the lunchroom
Clean up spills of any kind immediately
Do not place boxes on the floor always utilize pallets
Cover any cuts and scrapes with a bandage
Smoking in designated areas only
No spitting in the warehouse, including in the trash cans
Segregate damages in the specified areas
You kind of get the ideal, I’m sure these are among the list at your facility and they can include many others depending on the regulatory needs of your facility. If you have not been presented with this kind of documentation again its good knowledge to share with your management as GMP’s are important to ensure a well ran facility.
SOP’s or Standard Operating Procedures are a great tool to aid in productivity & Safety. Simply put it is an outline of how to perform the job, they can be very general or quite in-depth and detailed. Again, in the Foodservice Distribution arena you may have been presented an SOP sheet as an order selector to sign with something like:
Arrive to work on time and dressed for work wearing all required PPE’s or personal protective equipment, PPE’s will make another good episode later!
Proceed to the equipment charging area, retrieving your assigned jack and performing your Pre-trip inspection of the equipment
Sign into your selection equipment and pull your first batch down
Proceed to the first slot and complete your batch
Stage and wrap pallets at the assigned door
Proceed to the empty pallet area and retrieve pallets
Pull down your second batch and proceed to completion
Of course, that’s a quick example but you get the idea. The procedure should be written and reviewed with each employee for each task and documented. Many SOP’s may state how Damages will be handled, how equipment will be signed out or how particular incidents are recorded. Again, it’s all about documentation.
Properly having and documenting all Safety procedures are very important as well, from general safety rules to exactly describing the procedures for cleaning spills, properly lifting product and procedures for stacking pallets and controlling walkways. Pre and post trip inspections of equipment and a good Lock out Tag out program are good examples as well.
If your facility is lacking any strong GMP’s or SOP’s bring your ideas to your management team, they’ll recognize and appreciate your interest! After all that’s what you’re after right, being noticed and making that next step to reach your goals!
I seem to always end up talking about getting noticed! I think that’s the plan though. I mean even if we like our present job and we plan on retiring from it, don’t we still want to get noticed by our boss as the subject matter expert? Get noticed, in a good way, it’s what we need to do!
You know one thing that no body brought up, and it surprised me, and was one of the training topics that this week’s students seemed most interest in was OSHA. As experienced warehousemen I guess we’ve grown up with OSHA standards and as new boots we’re a little in awe of it. One of the takes always from the class regarding OSHA was how the standard had thought of everything and everything was spelled out and documented. OSHA held everyone’s attention. Which is a good thing right!
Well, there’s a few thoughts. I hope it brought back some of your great memories of getting started in the biz. What would you do differently next time? Head over to our Facebook and Twitter feeds @whseandops and share those answers with the group! I bet that’ll be interesting!
Until next week Be Safe and lets all mentor a new Boot this week!