Is Forklift Safety on Your Warehouse Checklist?
A large portion of your role as a warehouse manager is to consistently ensure that all of your valuable machinery and equipment pieces remain in proper working order so that you can effectively improve existing safety conditions. It’s essential to ensure your machinery and equipment remain in proper working order on a consistent, daily basis so that you can always maintain and improve warehouse safety conditions for your valuable employees on the premises. This assurance can also effectively help prevent the occurrence and avoidable frequency of accidents from happening throughout your warehouse spaces. OSHA ultimately requires that you perform daily pre-shift inspections of your powered industrial trucks, including any warehouse forklifts your staff uses on a regular or daily basis. These daily pre-shift inspections can help you achieve safety, efficiency, and other company goals.
Before an employee in your warehouse spaces operates any industrial truck or forklift, you want to perform a series of safety checks and inspections to ensure that the equipment piece or pieces are in proper working order for your employees to use and rely upon for predictable, consistent operation. In this article, we’ll review a safety checklist for forklifts and what must be done daily before using a forklift. Forklift safety should be on your warehouse checklist, and we’ll go over the specific benefits and how ELOKON’s sensor technology assistance systems can help you effectively maintain, promote, and even increase reliability, productivity, safety, and more.
Safety Checklist for Forklifts
Forklift safety is essential to any warehouse checklist for your valuable company. Warehouse activities can pose a risk of severe accidents and injuries for any employees in your warehouse spaces. A safety checklist for forklifts helps ensure the safety of any operator in your warehouse, prevent potential equipment damage, and keep you compliant with required OSHA inspection standards. A warehouse checklist for forklifts ensures that a given piece of valuable equipment is currently safe for employee use, reduces potential downtime due to improper maintenance, and extends the life of your warehouse forklifts. These checklists also enable you to consistently identify any present issues that require service or other attention in a more timely, productive, and ultimately beneficial manner.
Once you understand more about the specific benefits of a safety checklist for forklifts, you can have more profound, meaningful knowledge about how the lack of such a warehouse checklist can negatively impact your business. A lack of a warehouse checklist for forklifts can impact your insurance rates, employee injury and incident frequencies, employee and client retention and engagement, productivity, product and service provisions, and more. After considering the impactful benefits and otherwise considerable and ranging adverse effects, it’s time to move on to essential items for your forklift checklist.
What Must Be Done Daily Before Using a Forklift?
When engaging in forklift safety checks, you should check the pressure and overall condition of a given forklift’s tires with the engine off. You should also inspect the forklift’s present oil levels and check to see if the engine is leaking to any degree. You should note the condition of your forklift’s battery so that you can quickly and effectively replace it. Once the visual forklift safety checks are complete, it’s essential to ensure that your forklift operators and other warehouse employees can easily access all safety manuals and information. A given forklift operator in your warehouse should also have adequate room in the forklift’s path and above it to drive it safely. When a forklift operator turns the engine on, the first thing they should do is listen for any abnormal noises so that they can be quickly addressed.
Following these activities, other answers to “What must be done daily before using a forklift?” include checking the steering, brakes, gauges, chain anchor pins, forks, and hoses. If any of these equipment pieces appear loose or worn to any degree, it’s essential to take immediate action. This immediate action can help reduce any potential risks to a given forklift operator and help the safety, productivity, and efficiency of your warehouse team. A given forklift operator should also check to ensure that the forklift has an accurate and legible data plate that reflects the forklift’s current configuration. Once you know some of the top items and focuses for your forklift checklist, you can take more swift, appropriate action when necessary. With attuned assistance systems, ELOKON can also aid your efforts to maintain and increase forklift and ultimate warehouse safety.
Forklift Safety Equipment From ELOKON
ELOKON is a leader in assistance systems for forklift trucks. We ensure efficient, safe operations with proximity warning systems, fleet management systems, mobile personnel protection devices, radar-based systems for speed reduction, and stationary warning devices.
ELOshieldDRIVE provides vehicle-on-vehicle collision protection with visual and audible warnings. ELOshieldGO uses radio-based identification to automatically detect a person in the hazard zone of a forklift. ELOshieldZONE uses intelligent technology to recognize potential risks in hazardous or low-visibility areas. ELOspeed is an assistance system for automatic speed reduction of forklifts inside. ELOshieldSPEED enables an increased definition of individual danger zones. These warnings, employee and hazard detection capabilities, speed reduction capabilities, and more defined danger zones enable greater hazard awareness, action, and prevention for warehouse and forklift safety.
Increase Forklift Safety With ELOKON
Forklift safety checks for your valuable warehouse are essential for the consistently maintained, promoted, and improved safety of area employees. Consider these top forklift safety checklist items and ELOKON’s high-quality, reliable, and impactful intelligent technologies for increased safety, productivity, retention, revenue, and more.