Warehouse Safety
More than 131,000 workplace accidents every year.
Warehouse Safety: a major issue
Logistics managers face a dual challenge: avoiding damage to vehicles from collisions and ensuring the safety of their employees. Not easy given the ever-increasing activity in warehouse and production areas (due in part to the rise in e-commerce activities) and the high interaction between vehicles and people. Added to this is the pressure to increase productivity, which increases the burden on vehicles and staff and thus the risk of accidents.
In 2020, a total of 131,646 workplace accident reports were recorded in Belgium (*). This is a decrease compared to 2019, but still a significant figure. In the warehousing and transportation industry alone about 65% of accidents led to temporary or long term unavailability of the employee (**).
The price of workplace incidents.
Accidents in the workplace lead to a lot of human and financial suffering and cost companies a lot of money every year.
After all, every workplace accident involves so-called hard and soft costs. Hard costs are those associated with the subsequent legal settlement, compensation, damage to buildings or vehicles, downtime, etc. Soft costs are the costs related to the impact on the working atmosphere and the company image. Workforce safety and work floor accidents have gained a lot of attention and visibility over the last decade and most companies have brought the topic to the Board level to make sure it gets sufficient attention and that all measures are undertaken to actively address the prevention of any accidents.
52% of forklift incidents happen during transportation
Forklift incidents account for a significant share of the total number of workplace accidents in companies and of all the forklift incidents more than half (52%) are related to incidents during transportation (***) with one in 4 leading to fractures. The most common accidents in the warehouse are collisions or being struck by an object. Not only the forklift driver is at risk but also the pedestrians walking around in the warehouse or in the production site. This is because pedestrians are often overlooked on the work floor, for example due to the load on the forklift or the inattentiveness of the driver.
All the more reason to do everything possible to minimize the risk of this type of accident and revisit the way the warehouse or production site has been set up but also where and how people drive their forklift, interaction with pedestrians and a review of potential dangerous locations.
Determining the optimal safe working environment.
To prevent collisions between forklifts and between forklifts and people, Essensium has developed a new generation of RTLS solutions as part of its SafeTrack Vehicles and SafeTrack Pedestrians System. Whatever the safety risks involving forklifts, Essensium can help to determine how to create the optimal safe working environment taking care of the safety of pedestrians and vehicles and other assets.
Find out how below.
- (*) Source:Fedris.be
- (**) Source: Fedris.be
- (***) Source:Injuryfacts
