As part of a global organisation with warehousing / product handling activities supporting our core business we have invested over recent years in training, pedestrian / traffic separation, safety equipment on FLT's including blue spot warning lights, daily checks etc but are still having near miss and other incidents. Does anyone have any other innovative solutions to improving FLT safety and reducing incidents that they would be happy to share? Thanks in anticipation.

Thanks George.

Primarily looking at vehicles and pedestrians but also contact with fixed / stationary objects; have also put speed limiters on trucks and used incident case studies to build awareness. While not sigificant incident numbers as a percentage of our total incidents the potential for serious injury and working to change our culture around forklift safety.

Kind regards

Roger

As mentioned in the previous post, I had 360 degree cameras installed on all of our trucks due to a variety of accidents occurring and constant damage to racking, speed doors etc. Since installing them a year or two ago, damage has reduced significantly and the operators (although deemed competent already) are operating the vehicles in a safer manner. Other huge benefit are in accident / incident investigations - invaluable piece of equipment. 

Edited by user 05 February 2018 13:37:26(UTC)  | Reason: Typo

I would look at driver behaviour and maybe think about a safe behaviour observation scheme. Help to promote some ownership of safety among drivers and pedestrians.

Hi JC,

I am also interested in the camera system you installed.  We are looking for systems for our wheeled loading shovels.

Thanks,

Hi Pearce,

When I first started my current job, I immediately witnessed several employees working right next to an operating Forklift (usually chatting to the driver). I therefore rolled out a policy which prohibited anyone from being within 3m of an operating Forklift for any reason other than during one specific task for which it was deemed unavoidable - additional controls were in place for that task.

The rule is outlined to all staff primarily at induction stage for new staff but I also make the Forklift drivers aware that they are also responsible for ensuring people don't get too close. I give them information regarding why the rule is in place and so far everyone has agreed with it; that's probably just down to luck though! 

The rule is monitored by local supervisors/managers and any individuals being found to be breaking the rule are spoken to and reminded that breaking the rule is not tolerated (blah blah).

I'm not sure if your company already have something like this in place, however it can be a simple and effective solution if the staff buy in...which as always is the hard part!

Hope this helps.

Thanks Sgallacher27 and JCBushell for the helpful input.

I will definitely look at establishing a personnel exclusion zone round operating forklifts, we already use extending tape barriers in some facilities where there are specific pinch points and most of our plants are pretty tight on space as the warehouse / storage areas are secondary to the actual processing operations. A similar approach is probably the perimeter detection devices that are on the market which we could look at too.

JCBushell - Your use of the 360 deg cameras makes absolute sense, I will send a PM with my contact details; might be an interesting internal discussion with the Workers Councils in Europe and how if fits with the new GDPR which is already causing some headaches.