The Pillars of Creating a Safe Warehouse
This article discusses the steps you can take to create a safer warehouse, with facts pulled straight from Mazzella’s warehouse experts.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
High forklift traffic, poorly trained seasonal workers, outdated racking systems, and a lack of safety inspections is a disaster waiting to happen for your warehouse and the workers in it.
Fueled by the modern e-commerce boom, warehouses are becoming more dangerous than ever. Many warehouses are now the size of small towns, with hundreds of workers and dozens of forklifts swarming around at all hours. Injury and fatality rates are skyrocketing, and safety professionals need to adapt.
Most hazards in warehouses, however, are often the ones people walk past every day that build over time.
A safe warehouse isn’t achieved with a single solution. Instead, it’s achieved using multiple best safety practices. When done together, these pillars build a string foundation to reduce injuries, protect productivity, and create a workplace where people can do their jobs without unnecessary risk.
With the help of Mazzella’s internal warehouse solutions experts, this article breaks down the pillars of creating a safe warehouse. We will also look at how to assess your current operation, how to make improvements, and why a third-party warehouse integrator is the best choice.
Table of Contents
- What are the Most Common Hazards In a Warehouse?
- How Do You Create a Safer Warehouse?
- What Is the First Step to Improving Your Warehouse?
- Why Should You Partner with a Third-Party Warehouse Integrator?
- Why Should You Choose Mazzella to Improve Your Warehouse?
What are the Most Common Hazards In a Warehouse?
The most common hazards in warehouses tend to be:
- Damage to storage systems caused by forklift impacts
- Cluttered aisles that create blind spots and trip hazards
- Ergonomic strain from repetitive bending, reaching, pulling, and lifting
Our warehouse experts also find improperly sized storage systems, which tend to happen when a business purchases a warehouse and decides to keep the existing rack system rather than replacing them. They also find:
- Missing wire deck over walkways
- Poor lighting in high-traffic areas
- Unsecured storage racks without anchors
How Do You Create a Safer Warehouse?
There is no magic solution for creating safer warehouses. Instead, it takes multiple best safety practices…
Pillar 1: Regular Pallet Rack Inspections
Racking is the most critical system in a warehouse. It carries significant loads and is frequently exposed to equipment contact. Yet rack damage is often ignored, especially when it is minor or has been present for a long time.
Every bend and dent can compromise the rack’s load capacity. That’s why it’s recommended that you have a having a third-party inspect your racks. Third-party rack inspections give you an unbiased and accurate assessment of your warehouse pallet racking system’s condition.
While your safety coordinators are probably fair and trustworthy, having an experienced and trained inspector from outside your organization conduct the inspection removes the chance of implicit biases, where subconscious feelings and attitudes develop due to prior influences and experiences, which affect people’s decision-making processes without them even knowing it.
You should inspect your pallet racks at least once a year. However, if you’re involved in major distribution operations that require hundreds of workers, a fleet of forklifts, and hundreds of bays, quarterly inspections may be a better choice. Conversely, a mom-and-pop operation with one forklift pulling a handful of pallets a day will be fine with an annual inspection.
Pillar 2: Physical Guarding of Rack Systems
Warehouse rack guards, sometimes called frame protectors or end of aisle protectors, are protective steel structures installed on or around pallet racks to prevent or reduce damage from forklifts and other material handling vehicles. Guards come in a variety of sizes and models, too, including:
- Standard Upright and Column Protectors
- End-of-Aisle Guards
- Side and Frame Protectors
- Pallet Rack Back-of-Rack (Fall Prevention) Guards
Rack guards are an affordable, effective way to extend the life of racking systems, especially in facilities with high forklift traffic.
Pillar 3: Walk the Floor and Talk to Workers
Get out of your office, walk the floor, and talk to your employees. The people doing the work often know where the sketchy areas are before an accident happens.
Your workers understand where visibility is poor, where traffic patterns feel unsafe, where items are stored in a way that creates strain, and where near misses happen.
It’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to identify safety gaps.
Pillar 4: Improve Housekeeping Practices
A safer warehouse is built on consistency. Everything has a home, everything is clearly labeled, and the system is monitored so that items return to where they belong.
While housekeeping is often seen as just a cleanliness, organizational issue, it ties directly to safety. Clutter creates trip hazards, blocks sightlines, and forces people into unsafe movement paths.
Pillar 5: Improve Lighting Systems and Visibility
You cannot be safe around something you cannot see.
Upgrading warehouse lighting, often to LED type systems, can help prevent potential near-miss risks, slips, trips and falls while also providing better visibility of reports, pick tickets, product identifiers and better situational awareness.
Visibility matters most in:
- End-of-aisle intersections
- Inside aisles where lighting is uneven
- Areas with frequent lift truck turns
- Locations where labels must be read quickly and accurately
- Corners where pedestrians enter equipment zones
Pillar 6: Pedestrian and Forklift Traffic Separation
Near misses between pedestrians and lift trucks are one of the most common safety challenges in warehouses. Busy facilities have multiple trucks with real productivity targets, and they also have people moving across the building. That mix can lead to serious incidents happening.
Traffic safety improves dramatically when you implement zones for pedestrians and lift truck traffic
Many warehouses use floor tape, paint, or overhead lights. Those are helpful, but a physical guardrail creates an actual barrier that tells people where they can walk safely and where equipment can operate.
Pillar 7: Improved Ergonomics and Material Handling
Many common warehouse injuries are from strains; the repeated bending, reaching, pulling, and handling of loads stored in awkward positions.
One of the clearest ergonomic principles is bringing the product to the worker instead of forcing the worker down to the product.
The goal is to reduce the ‘grind’ during a shift. That means reducing physical exertion and minimizing awkward postures through better storage design and better material handling aids. A helpful concept is the “golden zone,” the working height between knees and shoulders.
Tools and equipment that reduce strain include:
- Lift tables
- Pallet positioners that raise and lower loads
- Carts that reduce carrying and pulling force, mechanical or electric
- Overhead cranes and lifting systems that shift load from people to equipment
A practical way to identify ergonomic priorities include:
- Watching where people repeatedly bend to floor level or reach above shoulder height
- Looking for manual handling of heavy, awkward items
- Noting tasks where two-person lifts are common
- Assessing whether storage methods are forcing workers in awkward, uncomfortable positions
What Is the First Step to Improving Your Warehouse?
If you’re serious about improving safety at your warehouse, it’s best to start with a professional safety audit. This audit includes an on-site visit from a third-party integrator, where they tour the facility and address current and future concerns.
This should be a collaborative process between your company and the third-party inspector/provider. Most companies (including yours, most likely) don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars in disposable income to throw at safety upgrades, and a warehouse solutions integrator should be able to help you space out, budget, and prioritize appropriately.
Why Should You Partner with a Third-Party Warehouse Integrator?
If you need new pallet racks, LED light systems, or rack guards, why wouldn’t you just work directly through a manufacturer? What makes a third-party integrator more reliable for your business?
Third-party integrators are not in the business of peddling a specific product. A rack manufacturer will always tell you that racks are the best option, even when a mezzanine is better. Integrators are in the business of finding the best product for that specific need, regardless of the manufacturer.
Sometimes, you may not need a new rack system. Integrators can also use their expertise to recommend pallet repositioning and aisle respacing to improve forklift paths and traffic. They can even recommend new types of decking based on a warehouse’s size and intended capacity. Warehouse integrators can also help you manage vendors, installers, and schedules.
Why Should You Choose Mazzella to Improve Your Warehouse?
At Mazzella, we want to partner with any company who’s passionate about improving safety at every level of their operations, especially in their warehouses.
That’s why we employ a full-time, in-house team that has decades of combined experience in the warehouse sector. On top of our industry-leading pallet rack inspection program, we can also help you with layout and design request. We also partner with the top manufacturers of:
- Pallet racks
- LED light systems
- Rack guards
- Conveyor systems
- Mezzanines
- Barriers
- And more!
We can also help your organization improve safety in areas outside of warehousing, too. Whether you’re comparing quotes or trying to budget, contact our team today to learn more.
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