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It’s week 50, is anyone freaking out yet? Maybe because we haven’t achieved a piece of our goals for the year or maybe even that now we need to be planning out our 2021! I’m not sure I’m concerned with either really, I’m just ready for 2020 to go away. I’m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career Podcast here with you, and I’m really really ready to close the door on 2020. If you’re a long-time listener you’ll know that we here at WAOC don’t like looking in the rearview mirror, our past is the past and we focus on the future. How well we’re doing our jobs today, how much better we’re going to be at them tomorrow and where and what we’re going to be doing between now and our retirement right?
Well, it is the end of the year. I was going through, looking at some numbers or losses I was involved in one way or another over the last 12 months and I thought I’d like to share a few thoughts with our team here. I hadn’t planned on talking about losses today, I’ll be working off of just bullet points and figures so bear with me a bit!
So does, lets see, 27,684.00 sound like a lot of money to you? Well, it does to me. Especially when I think about how when there’s 27,684.00 in just product, equipment, or building damages I feel like someone’s been cheated out of better pay or benefits or heck a pizza party and cupcakes! That’s a lot of money to me. So as companies are closing the year, I ran across a few instances and I want to talk about them for a few minutes. I think you’ll find a couple of them, well, odd maybe. Some you may shake your head like yep, been there, seen that.
So, let’s talk about warehouse equipment parked on a dock plate. As we’ve learned here at WAOC, there is never a good reason for a person to be on a piece of equipment or park a piece of equipment on a dock plate. If a truck is not in the door, we should just not drive our pallet jacks or forklifts on to a dock plate. Period. Even personnel carriers, no piece of powered industrial equipment. Oh, and why would we ever leave an empty pallet, or even a stacked pallet on a dock plate? Let’s check out a few notes I’ve made on loses I’ve been told about regarding dock plates over the last 12 months.
Bottom panels and mid panels. I’ve heard about 6 of them having to be purchased and replaced. Check this out, 3 of them at the same facility. I think once the bottom panel was just fixed but 3 times the same thing happened. The door straps or ropes we’re being closed up inside the trailers. Hadent happened in like 4 years. 3 doors, well, panels actually, were damaged over 4 months, and now nothing! Unloaders had closed the trailer doors, with the door strap inside the trailer, and when the truck pulled away, it racked the bottom panels right out of the tracks and out towards the yards!
Twice I heard about pallet jack drivers, attempting to pick up an empty pallet off of a dock plate with the door closed. Upon trying to enter the pallet, it scooted, right into the bottom panel, bending the panel.
When asked why did you not get off your jack and pick up the pallet or move it over to the side of the door, both reports read that the operator thought they could get under it enough to pull it away from the door?
Have you ever thought you could do that? Come on, you’ve tried, I’ve tried more times than I want to admit, and I was successful most of the time, but I almost hit the door more often than not. Knock on wood that I never tore one up!
And then this one. And this could have been bad, dangerous, and very expensive. A gentleman got on a dock stocker to move it off of the dock plate. Only thing was he’d never operated one before. He was a truck driver I think, wanting to pop the dock plate and start unloading his truck. He turned it on, didn’t know how to steer it or stop it, ran it forward, sticking the forks through the bottom panel and through his trailer door as well.
6 door panels, all preventable. All because someone was saving 6 or 7 seconds.
Have you ever had a peer hit a fire doorway with their forks or mast because they forgot to lower the forks before moving that first inch? A stand up forklift. The operator had just placed a pallet on the 6th level, backed out of a corner aisle, turned to drive through an equipment doorway into the dry side of the building and never thought about lowering his forks. Have you ever done it or almost done it? Come on, your grinning right? Again, I’m going to be honest and say I’ve caught myself before something happened, and yes more than once!
He hit it driving backwards, upon impact it threw him off the lift and stuck itself in the doorway. He was thankfully not hurt at all, just scared. The lift though had to be disassembled a bit to clear the doorway and fixing all the warped parts was a bit expensive!
Oh, here’s a good one. Happened twice, at two different produce companies. Sit down forklifts, unloading pallets, going a little too fast, loses traction, gets a little sideways and tears a hole into the trailer wall. Both operators said the wet floor caused it. The wet floor wasn’t the root cause of those incidents.
How about those electronic door controls that we use to lock trailers to the dock with and raise and lower the dock plates with? Ever seen one of those crushed by a stack of pallets or product that was being staged where it shouldn’t be? Ever seen it happy twice? We all know better than to position anything in front of those things. How’d it happen?
And this one, things like this happens every day. So why do us replenishment forklift operators try and save that extra product lift by trying to grab the top pallet of a 2 or 3 stack that’s been placed on the top level by the put away guy? There is rarely enough room to clear it. Bring down the 2 or 3 pallets, take ours and set it to the side, and re-lift the other 1 or 2 to the top again. One place lost 2 partial pallets of berries and in another incident a pallet of sour cream 1-gallon buckets were dropped. That was more than a mess. I know because I had to clean it up. I didn’t do it, my boss did, but I did have to clean it up!
And pulling a battery charger off the wall? How many times have you done that? OK, how many times have you almost done that? I did actually do that once! Got in a lot of trouble with that one! I did learn to check those cables though from then on!
Scrubber brushes. I didn’t realize the cost of scrubber brushes. One of the first thing we learn while being taught to drive the sweeper or scrubber is to never run over wood or shrink wrap. The cost of those brushes is why!
And what about leaving product on a trailer? Either mis-receiving it or just not unloading it all. And if its frozen or perishable it’s an even worst mistake. We could have the added cost of disposal added on.
Let’s go back to that $27, almost $28k expense figure I spoke about. Notice how I have not used the word accident tonight. Not one of those incidents I mentioned earlier could be classified as an accident. Rules, that each operator knew, were broken. Every one of those expenses could have been avoided.
We are professional warehouse men and women. How do these things happen to us! We all know. We lose focus for a minute. We get in a hurry. We get frustrated that someone has made our job harder than it has to be! We all get it. How about we each make a promise to ourselves to be better in 2021?
How’d you like that, I turned the conversation right back around to planning, goals, and 2021!
Seriously though. We have one of those little incidents. A door panel may cost like 450 to get fixed. We know that’s a lot of money and I’m certain that we all take it seriously. But imagine if we drove off with our equipment. It becomes a lot more serious at that point.
Think about what could happen. Not to mention what our companies could do with those savings. Maybe more equipment or newer equipment, bonuses or raises even!
I don’t know. I was just thinking of all these kinds of things I heard about this year, and what could have happened, I guess. I wanted to share those thoughts with you.
Ok, so until next week, please think about what we’ve been trained to do, how we’re supposed to act. We have friends, family and those most important to us waiting on us to get home each shift. Let’s all be safe and go home to them!