Three hazard areas cover most of what goes wrong in a warehouse.
Here is what they look like in a hall like yours, and what a shift
can practise without holding a lorry at the dock.
Manual handling, internal traffic, slips and trips. Your risk
assessment lists them separately. In a hall they turn up in the same
pick, on the same trip to the dock.
The last case on the pallet is the one at floor level.
Bend, twist, lift, turn to the cage, and do it again. The correct
way costs a second per case, and there are a few hundred cases
before the break. Nobody decides to lift badly; the rate decides
it for them.
Hazard area: Manual handling. It is what this industry does all
day, and it is what this industry stops counting.
A truck backs out of a bay as a picker cuts across behind it.
The routes are marked and the driver knows them. What is not
marked is the pallet set down over the line for two minutes, the
aisle that is one metre narrower during peak, and the fact that
nobody hears a truck in a hall that is running.
Hazard area: Internal traffic. Forklifts and tugger trains meet
people on foot.
Wrap on the floor and a wet strip inside the dock door.
Cut banding, a broken pallet slat, rain walked in from the yard,
a strap left where a load stood. None of it looks dangerous, and
all of it lies on the way somebody walks carrying something, at
the end of a shift.
Hazard area: Slips, trips and falls. The most common accident type
there is, in this industry and in every other.
Manual handling causes more reportable accidents at work than any
other hazard area —
197,022 in a year. It is the one
nobody puts on the board, because it is the job.
Germany, statutory accident insurance (DGUV)
None of this holds a lorry at the dock.
A run takes minutes and happens in your own hall. It fits into the
gaps a shift already has, and it can be done again as often as a team
needs.
It runs between two waves, not between two seasons.
Two or three people at a time, at handover, in the lull after a
wave has gone out, on the quiet Tuesday before a peak. The
situation runs for them and ends when they are done. No aisle is
closed, no bay is blocked and no pick rate is dropped for it.
That is what makes repeating it possible. The same situation can be
run again in the same week and again before the next season, as
often as somebody needs it, and it costs the shift the same few
minutes every time.
Whoever is on the shift rota this week.
New starters taken on in the middle of a season, agency staff for
peak, a night shift that never overlaps with the day. They go
through the same run as the permanent team, in the week they
arrive, instead of waiting for a date that suits everyone.
Every run is written down.
Who took part, on what, and when — by shift and by site,
ready to export into the records you keep anyway. Participation,
nothing about how a single person did.
Trainings for a warehouse
These are the ones that fit the work in a hall. The time says how
long one run takes, from start to finish.
