5 hygiene rules to follow in your warehouse handling during pandemic

The confinement is progressing gradually and most activities are resuming. If your company includes a warehouse and uses forklifts and other handling equipment, you must ensure the safety of your employees by applying strict rules in terms of hygiene and compliance with government recommendations.

The Handling Blog helps you by offering 5 tips to ensure maximum safety in your handling! See you at the end of the article to give us your opinion and your own ideas in the comments 🙂

1. Assign one truck per operator.

By assigning a truck to a specific driver, you limit the risk of transmission of the virus during shift changes or shifts. Indeed, by proceeding in this way, each trolley will only be used by one person and will not have to be professionally cleaned and disinfected between each use.

If this is not possible, we recommend you disinfect the carts at each shift.

This will ensure that shared carts will not be a risk factor for your employees. We, therefore, advise you to disinfect each truck used by several people during its working day, especially at the start of the day, but also between each use by a different driver.

In addition to being able to manage truck access authorizations for your employees, the Fleet Manager solution allows you to answer these questions:

• Who has the right to use which cart and for what purpose?
• When did an unusual shock occur?
• What is the utilization rate of your carts?

2. Provide hydroalcoholic gel

This will hardly surprise you, but we strongly recommend that you make disinfectant solutions such as hydroalcoholic gel available at strategic locations in your premises and warehouse so that each driver disinfects their hands before and after using the truck.

It is very important that your employees disinfect their hands before and after using equipment that other people can touch: steering wheel, driving controls, seat belt, seat adjustments… are all places where you have to be careful-Ticarticle.

3. Facilitate and optimize external cleaning company interventions (repairs, maintenance, cleaning.)

Using handling equipment daily during a pandemic does not exclude breakdowns and the need for repair or maintenance. This can, therefore, entail an external technical intervention that should be prepared and optimized so that it takes place in the best conditions while reducing the risks as much as possible.

• • Group together and reduce interventions as much as possible… By favoring multi-brand repairers if you have trucks of different brands.
  • Let the trolleys air out at least 1 hour before the technician comes by.
  • Prohibit staff access to the repair area for the duration of the intervention to avoid contact between your staff and the external worker
  • Have the intervention reports sent by email
  • Disinfect the equipment used by the technician after his intervention

4. Rethink your traffic plan if necessary

Within the workshops, we recommend it to favor one-way traffic.

If changes have to be made to the traffic plan, they mainly concern places requiring crossings and interactions between personnel and machines, or between several machines. It is, therefore, necessary to review the organization of the spaces to limit these crossings as much as possible.

The goal is to streamline, not slow down.

Once the changes have been made, it is important to communicate well and clearly display the traffic rules (new and pre-existing).

5. Limit contacts and proximity thanks to signaling aid systems

There are many signaling aid systems that are particularly useful for signaling the arrival of a trolley. Receive our free detailed guide with all the technical information and advice!