want a safe warehouse?
think pink!

Bill Hayes, general manager of APL Logistics’ Tracy, Calif., distribution center, has reason to be proud. The 750,000-square- foot warehouse recently achieved two notable safety milestones: 1 million man-hours with no OSHA-recordable injuries, and four years without a single injury. What makes these achievements all the more remarkable is that this is a high-volume, fast-paced operation. Its 110 employees typically handle 120 trucks’ worth of consumer packaged goods a day over three shifts.

What’s Hayes’s secret? For one thing, he has paid special attention to visibility. The roof supports, guards around doors and loading docks, and other uprights in the Tracy DC are painted pink—a color that’s easily noticeable because it stands out sharply from the surroundings.

Hayes also adopted a trick developed by another APLL facility. He had each forklift outfitted with a safety flag that juts out horizontally from the back, at a level above employees’ heads. That visual signal has proved to be more effective than sound. Although the lift trucks beep while backing up, the sound echoes, and it’s not always obvious where the truck is located. Now, when drivers back out of a storage bay into an aisle, the colorful flag is visible to pedestrians before they see the truck.

More conventional tactics also are in place. All new employees undergo an in-depth orientation and training program that stresses zero tolerance of safety violations. In addition, APLL conducts monthly training sessions, with topics chosen to reflect real-life incidents. For instance, if employees at one of the company’s 167 facilities were experiencing back strain from incorrect lifting, the company would include a segment on proper lifting techniques in the next month’s training materials.

The Tracy DC has incorporated safety into its gain-sharing program, giving workers an added incentive to play by the rules. “If there are any incidents,” Hayes explains, “the people involved in them do not get a payout that week.”

inbound

Many people were surprised when Pittsburgh was chosen to host

September’s meeting of the “Group of Twenty” (G- 20) finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world. Some still think of the once-grimy city as a smaller version of Detroit— dependent on a single, declining industry. But as local government and economic development agencies aimed to prove while the G- 20 was in town, the Steel City is fast becoming a center of industrial innovation.

Among the technologies on display for visiting dignitaries and media were robots manufactured by Seegrid Corp. The five-year-old company, a spin-off from Carnegie-Mellon University’s Robotics

Institute, makes vision-guided robots that automate the movement of goods in warehouses and distribution centers. The AGV-like machines “learn” their jobs by moving along work paths under human guidance and then repeating those journeys as directed.

Pittsburgh puts best foot—er, wheel—forward

You’re no doubt familiar with the term “battle of the bands.” But did you know there’s a similar—albeit less catchily named—competition in the world of warehousing?

The annual Material Handling Student Design Competition, sponsored by the College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE), pits student teams against one another in a contest to design a manufacturing or distribution facility that supports the needs of a fictional company.

This year’s case example, developed by Keogh Consulting, required students to act as the design engineering team for the fictional Dollar Value Supplies, a third-party logistics (3PL) company that operates as a wholesale-distributor to grocery retailers. The challenge was to design a distribution center for a nationwide grocery retailer by utilizing an existing facility that was ready for final fit-out.

Three academic and three industry judges evaluated the entries based on criteria related to product flow, equipment utilization, space utilization, operational plan, overall integration, and economic justification. Judges also were asked to evaluate the teams’ writing quality, analysis, and presentation.

Teams from universities with the word “Technology” in their names were the big winners: Virginia Institute of Technology (first place), Georgia Institute of Technology (second place), and Rochester Institute of Technology (third place). Honorable mention went to a team from Texas A&M University.

CICMHE is an independent organization that prepares and provides information, teaching materials, and events in support of material handling education and research.