What are the occupational health and safety risks affecting your warehouse operations?
Warehouses are busy, bustling environments. And while there is plenty of safety advice and guidance for teams operating in warehouses, these workplaces still present a high risk of injury and ill-health for anyone working on the premises. Between heavy machinery, heavy loads and lifting, workers operating at height, dangerous hazards, long hours, and moving vehicles, it’s easy to see how reports of work-related accidents across the warehousing industry (together with the storage and hauling industries) have topped 8500 in previous years.
In this article, we explore how a modern approach to workplace risk management can better protect warehouse workers from known threats to their health and safety, including Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs). Specifically, we’ll review how Reactec’s ecosystem of Cloud-powered workplace wearables can help organisations create a safer workplace for teams operating in these inherently dangerous environments. We’ll also discuss new and emerging technologies that are set to change the landscape of warehouse working in the future.
Proximity Warning Systems: Streamline Warehouse Operations While Creating Safer Workplaces
Warehouse workers are exposed to multiple sources of risk every single day. We’ve written before about the risks inherent to warehouse operations in our popular “Day in the Life” series, where we followed workers through a typical shift as they operated forklifts in a busy warehouse. That article highlighted the ways in which teams are using R-Link’s advanced proximity warning technology to help ensure the safety of employees operating in or near vehicles, heavy machinery, and exclusion zones.
In that article, we reviewed the specific ways that R-Link’s proximity warning technology helps warehouse teams work more safely.
These include:
- Automatic pairing of R-Link and vehicles for drivers and operators: the R-Link Driver’s Watch automatically pairs operators’ watches with their vehicle, and ensures that no unnecessary alerts are triggered during operation. Additionally, drivers can easily, quickly give other workers a ‘digital thumbs-up’ to get close to their vehicle on an as-needed basis, without triggering any dangerous proximity alerts.
- Automatic recognition of safe areas: teams can use R-Link to set up safe zones, such as meal areas, where workers don’t receive any alerts from their devices. If a worker fails to ‘tag out’ of a safe zone, R-Link will automatically recognise that they’ve left the area, and resume normal notifications.
- Automatic recognition of exclusion zones: teams can use R-Link to set up exclusion zones which respond to individual workers’ credentials. These help ensure that workers remain in specific work areas based on their responsibilities and authorisation. On a day-to-day basis, it’s easy to control or change access to different work areas.
In addition to proximity warning, R-Link - Reactec’s third generation workplace wearable technology - offers warehouse teams personalised, real-time insight into their exposure to risk from vibration, dust, and noise.
R-Link’s advanced proximity warning technology helps to ensure the safety of employees operating in or near vehicles, heavy machinery, and exclusion zones
WMSDs Among Warehouse Workers: Causes and Contributing Factors
For warehouse workers, the use of vibrating tools and equipment, repetitive motion or force, and working in awkward positions can all contribute to the occurrence of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs). WMSDs include Hand Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS) and other conditions such as arthritis, osteoporosis, inflammatory diseases, widespread pain conditions, and connective tissue diseases and disorders. These conditions are usually cumulative and chronic, meaning they worsen and evolve over time: This can be particularly concerning for warehouse workers, who often work long shifts over extended workweeks.
In fact, it’s not uncommon for warehouse workers to spend 8-12 hours on the clock, and for some teams, rotations are six or seven days long. When warehouse workers spend this much time on their feet, loading and unloading, using vibrating tools, and operating heavy machinery, the likelihood that they will experience injury or ill health increases, particularly if their exposure to these potentially dangerous sources of risk aren’t adequately monitored and managed.
R-Link is part of Reactec’s cutting-edge ecosystem of workplace wearable technology, and it’s trusted by teams all over the world to help prevent WMSDs, particularly HAVS. R-Link monitors individual workers’ exposure to risk from vibration, alerting them when they near or exceed predetermined exposure thresholds. The data collected by R-Link can be used by Safety Managers to identify issues of worker behaviour and tool condition, so that confident and
effective steps can be taken to better protect workers.
But it’s not just WMSDs that require warehouse teams to stay vigilant. Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) and dust-related industrial diseases are also major areas of concern for teams operating in these environments.
The R-Link watch monitors an individual workers’ exposure to risk from vibration, alerting them when they near or exceed predetermined exposure thresholds.
Leveraging the IoT for 360-Degree Risk Management:
Warehouses are often loud environments where materials and supplies are constantly moving. As a result, noise and dust are unavoidable by-products of warehouse operations. But both noise and dust pose extraordinary risk to workers, when exposure isn’t adequately monitored and managed.
Through close collaboration with leading suppliers, Reactec has brought dust and noise monitoring data - including personalised information about individual workers’ exposure to these sources of risk - into a single analytics platform that offers unprecedented insight into your total workplace risk environment. Made possible through the Internet of Things (IoT) - a network of devices which are connected via the internet to enable the free and fast exchange of important information - this 360-degree view of your workplace risk environment offers you a platform with insight into your workers’ personal exposure to vibration, dust, noise, and proximity to hazards, all in one place.
And unlike traditional, paper-based methods for monitoring and managing risk at work, which are error prone and time consuming, this Cloud-based system is accurate, reliable, and purpose-built to keep up with the pace of your operations, enabling critical workplace exposure data to be updated and shared in near-real time.
A Single Platform for Monitoring and Managing Your Warehouse Risk Environment
It’s clear that teams operating in warehouses have a high likelihood of exposure to risk from many sources, including dangerous hazards, vibration, dust, and noise. In particular, warehouse workers are at risk of developing WMSDs, such as HAVS, due to the type of work that they carry out on a daily basis. Lifting heavy loads, working in awkward positions, or engaging in forceful or repetitive movements can all cause and contribute to chronic and potentially debilitating conditions.
Fortunately, teams can take control of their risk environment - even one as multifaceted and dynamic as a warehouse - with purpose built technology that’s proven to help teams drive better health and safety outcomes. Reactec’s ecosystem of technology makes it possible for organisations to effortlessly monitor and manage their workers’ risk from multiple sources. And with a Cloud-powered analytics platform that analyses data and generates relevant insights without any manual intervention, you’ll have time to focus on what matters most - identifying issues, improving controls, and creating the safest environment possible for your warehouse workforce.
