From Training to Enforcement

This puts supervisors in a bind: How can they account for and control potential compliance violations? Before that question can be addressed, we must look at the specific challenges and their respective solutions.

Problems and Opportunities
Following are major lift truck safety challenges material handling professionals face and examples of current technologies that can address them.

• Compliance with pre-use safety checklist. While paperbased systems were manageable in the past, they have become obsolete in this day and age. With businesses expanding in all directions, manual documentation of the pre-use safety checklist is not optimal. A comprehensive, computerbased system can monitor each employee’s responses to the checklist. Then, managers can tie the condition of the lift truck to its specific operator. These systems should report data in real time to guarantee employees complete the checklist thoroughly and properly.

• Controlling lift truck access. Ensuring only trained individuals operate the equipment is fundamental to a safe and productive workflow. To ensure investment in extensive training doesn’t go to waste, managers can apply a system that limits access strictly to trained professionals. Certified employees would be required to swipe their individual access cards before operating the equipment. Software allows managers to grant access to particular employees for the machines they are certified to operate.

• Tracking operator training expiration. It’s often difficult to monitor the specifics of each operator’s mobile equipment certification. Strict safety guidelines do not grant room for mistakes, so each company must employ a consistent and proactive system that records the details of employee training and expiration dates. Computer-based software can render the data into usable reports.

• Identify operators often linked to accidents. Mobile fleet maintenance is expensive, and unnecessary accidents significantly impact the bottom line. Managers should look for a solution for tracking and managing incidents. Some systems include impact sensors that notify the appropriate authorities as soon as the detector alarms. A thorough solution allows employers to monitor relevant information, such as type of impact, impact frequency and magnitude, time of impact and name of operator. Proper data collection ensures accountability in the workplace and encourages employees to follow guidelines carefully, since they are held responsible for any oversights.

• Track avoidable damage to facility and merchandise. Software can monitor operator information, impact frequency and damage history by issuing alerts to the appropriate personnel for immediate action. It is important to find easy-to-use software to manage these instances and implement procedures immediately.

In the end, material handling professionals can free themselves from the bind of assuming responsibility for all employees. With the right technology, workers have no choice but to comply. And, with better safety comes improved productivity and profitability. As industries continue to expand, leading to the development of more complex business challenges, advanced management technologies will likely take center stage in the foreseeable future.

Robin Streit is marketing associate at Mountainside, N.J.-based Access Control Group, a provider of mobile asset management solutions. She can be reached at rstreit@assetor.net or 908-361- 6501.