Safety touches every employee throughout every organization, from front office staff to planning and logistics. Over the past two years, your business, like many others, has experienced many changes and new challenges. To keep up with customer demand, you may have new material flows, or even inventory in locations where employees don’t expect it to be. On top of these changes, you have likely seen an influx of safety concerns, heavily driven by turnover in operations.
With these changes, business owners and managers have to ensure that safety is at the core of their organization’s culture. Consistent, continuing training, daily stand-up meetings, and regular safety checks are as important now as ever.
Along with operator and pedestrian training programs, you also have an opportunity to leverage technology to your advantage. With telematics, automation, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), and automated guided forklifts (AGFs), operations can control the speed of vehicles, ensure consistency in terms of pre-op checks and maintenance, and even avoid collisions.
We all want the same thing: We want our businesses to be both productive and profitable. It starts with safety! Safer operations equal lower maintenance costs and less downtime.
Injuries can happen in the blink of an eye. Having a safety culture and a strong training toolkit is critical when we see extremely high turnover and new people coming into the business. What’s great about the lift truck industry is that we offer operator and pedestrian consulting to ensure that operations become safer and all OSHA requirements are being met. Any business can take advantage of these services by contacting the Industrial Truck Association (ITA) directly, your local forklift dealer, or by visiting our website and exploring its resources at www.lindeforklifts.com/NFSD.
Contributed by Linde Material Handling
