Ep. #2: How-To Bring Safety to Every Dock

This episode of Right from the Source features Chad D. with Right Hype Products Corp. facility managers can bring safety to every dock. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on Productivity, energy safety. and environmental control. at the loading dock and inside your industrial or commercial facility.

Welcome back listeners. Today on the Right High podcast, we have with us Chad Dilavou. Hi Chad, thanks for being here. Yeah. Yeah. So Chad, uh tell our listeners what your position is with Right Height and give us a little background about your uh expertise in the industry. Sure.

Well I've worn many hats at Right Height. I've been with the company now twenty four years, or actually in my twenty fourth year right now, and uh was with one of our independent distributors for a couple of years before that. So Uh celebrating 26 years in the Right Hide family. My current role is product manager for Righthide Products Corporation. So I'm responsible for our dock levelers, our dock locks. and uh those types of products around the loading dock.

So working at the loading docks, very dangerous place. A lot of accidents happen there. Can you talk a little bit about some of those dangers that uh are typical on the loading dock? Every year OSHA has reported accidents that involve forklifts.

and it's around a hundred thousand accidents every single year. I think the number for uh twenty eighteen came in around a hundred and ten thousand. But it's very common in the industry to reference a hundred thousand forklift accidents every single year. And uh it's estimated that seven thousand of those accidents involve a forklift.

driving off the face of the loading dock. So uh loading dock is typically forty eight inches high, so let's say four feet high. Your average forklift weighs um about the same as three automobiles. Some of the heavier ones can be as many as three SUVs. So that particular danger has been talked about and well known for many years and that's been the focus of loading dock safety really since probably nineteen eighty.

Going back about two years ago, Reite started spending some time in the other ninety three thousand accidents that happened a year that nobody really seemed to be talking about too much. Inside the facility, about 80,000 accidents a year involve a pedestrian and that 10,000 to 12,000 pound forklift.

So think about a person getting hit in a crosswalk by an automobile and your reaction you might have if you saw that. Now picture someone getting hit by three automobiles at the same time essentially. Uh and that happens 220 times a day, 365 days a year. It isn't something that you want to picture, and unfortunately it's happening pretty regularly. There's also some accidents outside the dock that are happening way more frequently than anybody would like.

OSHA has cited that tractor trailers are the second leading cause of backover fatalities in the United States. So what that means is that tractor trailers, uh semi trailers are out there when they're backing up, unfortunately they're striking and killing people and a lot of those instances are happening at the loading dock.

And like the other accidents, this the backover accidents aren't just a focus in the United States. Uh New Zealand has recommended backup cameras and reversing alarms on every single powered industrial truck in the country. And France has actually recommended five hundred millimeter dock bumpers, which is about twenty inches of dock bumpers, to create a refuge zone. So if a truck is backing up, you can at least get in this little twenty-inch pocket.

and hope that the truck doesn't crush and kill you. So it's a problem everywhere and uh it definitely is something we need to be thinking about here and and trying to prevent those types of actions. Can you talk a little bit about what sorts of things have become almost ubiquitous at the dock and and really what kinds of safety systems are are becoming uh more prevalent here in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen?

Sure. I mentioned the 7,000 accidents of a forklift driving off the edge of a dock. And for many, many years, that was the main focus of dock safety. You had things like safety levelers or levelers with the barrier built in that uh that would stick up and keep a forklift from driving off the edge of the dock.

And you also had dock lock vehicle restraints that would actually secure a semitractor trailer to the building so that the trailer couldn't separate from the building, creating another one of these types of accidents. Very prevalent solutions for many, many years. One of the challenges with that, though, is it was kind of an all or nothing approach.

You know, you had to lay out a lot of cash in order to get really either one of those solutions. And for Fortune five hundred companies or larger companies that safety minded companies with larger budgets. Not a pleasant thing necessarily to undertake all the time, but certainly something they could undertake a little more easily than some of the smaller facilities or smaller organizations around that just couldn't afford that.

So I think what's changed is the options that companies have today to kind of start with a ground up approach. Um it's not just a dock locker or a safety lip leveler or you're not safe anymore. Uh there are lots of different things at the loading dock that can help improve safety. And people can do it on their own budget or people can do it uh within the context of their own priorities and where they want to start. You mentioned a a couple safety options that are you know, a a physical

deterrent uh to some of those trailer separation accidents like the dock lock. Can you talk about some other safety solutions that might be available for facility managers at the loading dock that aren't like that?

Sure. Um the most common and I I think the most basic vehicle restraint available is the simple light communication system. Now OSHA requires that you either chalk a tire of a trailer or that you have a mechanical means to restrain the trailer. And we certainly recommend following not only the OSHA guidelines, but making sure that you have a physical means of restraining the trailer.

But if you think about if a tractor is attached to that trailer and the driver of that trailer has a red light and they follow that red light and they don't go anywhere until they get a green light, really is the safest environment that you could possibly have and you wouldn't even need anything securing the the tractor or the trailer to the building. So I think oftentimes that's overlooked.

And people think, well, gee, if I'm gonna have this light package I got I have to have it attached to a vehicle restraint or a dock lock. And that simply isn't the case. Uh there's different variations of that uh communication system, uh some for simple

mechanical locks, uh even such as a wheel chalk, adding a manual light system to a wheel chalk. You also though have dock lock style light communication packages that would afford you the ability to add um any other types of protection products including uh a dock lock in the future that you can purchase just standalone all by itself. It's almost like this upgradable package that you know you start with If you'd like to make those advancements you certainly you certainly can.

That's right. This dock lock style light communication package, one of the nice things about it is in addition to a dock lock that you can add to it, there are several more cost effective features that you can add if you want to start focusing on those other types of safety first.

Great example if you're chalking a tire, you're out on that drive approach. So you want to make sure you're protecting that employee or that truck driver from the backover accidents that we talked about that are on the rise. And there uh there's a system that you can buy that includes sensors to sense the truck backing in, and then it has flashing lights and an audible horn to let anybody in that drive approach know that there's impending danger.

People just don't realize how much ambient noise there is out at a loading dock. When you're getting noise from inside the building you might have highway noise or road noise from outside of the building. Uh quite frankly you just might have wind and birds chirping and all the stuff that normally happens outside that it it really can be silent as that trailer backs towards you. So having a a system like this

Rightheight calls it approach view that's out available on on the drive approach. It helps you to understand the danger that might be coming, helps you to get out of the way. And it's a lot more affordable than some of the elaborate paint jobs and different things that we see on drive approaches to say, Hey, you can stand here but don't stand there mm, that sort of thing.

Uh'cause quite frankly, you've got people oftentimes you you've got a lot of people on the drive approach doing different things. Uh if you're staging trailers, you have truck drivers getting out of their cab uh to disconnect the tractor from the trailer. You've got landing gear that needs to be put down then on the trailer so that it doesn't fall once the tractor pulls away.

Hopefully you've got trailer stabilizing jacks that are being put underneath the nose of the trailer. You might be chalking tires. The big one that a lot of companies don't think about because they might be able to minimize a lot of the other action activity on the dock. is that truck drivers

almost every time have to get out and open the door of the truck that they're bringing in before they back it into the dock position. And uh unfortunately if you watch the headlines a lot of times that's what you see. You see driver killed. at loading dock and it's the driver of an adjacent truck that that gets out to do some one of these tasks and unfortunately um is hit and gets killed.

Now, obviously you've talked a lot about outside of the loading dock here. Inside the loading dock too, light communication is becoming more and more important as well. It's becoming more and more um busy inside of facilities. Um everybody likes to reference the e-commerce effect and all of that stuff. It's heightening our awareness of how quickly we can get product.

And quite frankly, the e-commerce effect really is is is increasing the volume and the throughput of a lot of these distribution centers. Forklift manufacturers have kind of long ago recognized the increase in accidents with pedestrians. I mentioned that eighty thousand number and and I just want to reiterate again because it it is such an important accident.

Two hundred and twenty times a day, every single day in the United States, a person is hit by the equivalent of three cars at the same time. So if you're listening to this podcast today, try to wrap your head around that. During today, that's gonna happen two hundred and twenty times. The blue light policy that a lot of companies have adopted is I think a brilliant one.

Um you could put just about anybody, including a an elementary school age kid in a in a facility and they see a light coming at them, they think, Oh, something's coming, I'm gonna move. So the blue lifts at uh blue lights, excuse me, attached to the forklifts are a really great concept. There's some challenges though. A lot of times at intersections you can't see the blue light because they're around a corner.

Uh certainly when you're loading or unloading a trailer at the loading dock, you can't tell if there's activity inside of that trailer. So Right Height offers a couple of different products. Uh for intersection control there's a product called Safety Signal, which uh has light

um stop signs and yield signs that hang from the ceiling and if motion is sensed in more than one direction it projects a blue light onto the floor as well. And you can get remote sensors for those so you can actually see the light coming from around a corner and different things like that. But it's a great

at the intersection and make the intersections in your facility safer. At the loading dock in particular, when that blue light on the forklift disappears into the trailer, by the time you see that blue light, you've got less than two seconds to react. And what we're really trying to do is help people understand there's motion inside of a trailer so that a forklift could be backing out at any time.

Uh so we have a product called Pedestrian View that interfaces with uh either a dock lock style like communication package. Uh you can also do just a pure standalone version of that. You don't need a restraint or a communication system. Or it interacts with one of our dock-lock vehicle restraints.

But what it does is it mounts on either side of the door opening it and it detects motion inside of that trailer. So it projects a blue light onto the the loading dock leveler when there's motion in that. So everybody around knows that there's activity in the trailer. Watch for something coming out. And if you're a facility that does mixed loading, so you might have some people going in to secure loads.

They're on foot or you might have them taking some pallets in with the pallet jack and you've got motorized traffic with forklifts as well. It's a really nice safety feature to have that because a forklift may come barreling around the corner going into that trailer and if they see the blue light flashing, they know somebody's in there right now. Some of the ad I say advanced controls, I have to be careful how I use that terminology because um it's really just

uh taking an advanced look at how the controls work and creating what we call a sequence of operation where you can interlock many pieces of equipment. Uh for example A a customer may want to really lock down the process and safety and make sure that a vehicle restraint is engaged. prior to someone entering the trailer. So if you have multiple pieces of equipment, we can tie all that together with the same controls.

So that for example, the dock lock needs to be engaged and have a positive engagement on the trailer before you can operate the dock leveler and put it into the back of the trailer. Mm-hmm. And by the same token, we can't unlock the the dock lock while the dock leveler is engaged with the trailer.

So we have to store the dock leveler first, then we can unlock the trailer. And we can also build in interlocks with a lot of other equipment around the loading dock. For example, whether your overhead door is open or closed. Um whether there's a trailer actually present at the dock or not, there's a lot of different things that you can do with technology today to make sure people are following a safe protocol.

What would be your advice advice, Chad, for a facility manager who's looking to introduce some of these uh dock safety solutions from the ground up? I think the first thing that I would do is engage a professional within the industry. Everybody likes to go to the internet today and do a search and there is a wealth of great information out there.

The challenge with a lot of that information is you're not really sure whether it's coming from a reputable company or not. And quite frankly, a lot of companies with web storefronts or web presence really are just kind of creating some solutions and throwing them out there and you're kind of left to your own devices to figure out how to install it, where to install it, how it actually works, that sort of thing.

So I think engaging a professional, a salesperson to come out and really take a look and help you evalu evaluate your current situation, they can also present some solutions. that as we've talked about today really span anybody's budget. You know, you might have twenty thousand dollars per dock and you wanna go in with all the bells and whistles you can.

You might have$1,000 for doc and picking a solution that you can install yourself is important because then you save the money on installation. A sales professional is going to be able to help you walk through those options and understand what your options are.

They're also gonna help you understand and get a better feeling for your potentially your long-term needs and solutions. So piecemealing things in from the internet or from internet storefronts, you might be buying systems that do what you want them to do, but they are completely unique.

They don't interact with each other and before you know it you've got all of this stuff cluttering up your loading dock. Whereas if you sat down with somebody and said, Hey, here's where I think I wanna be in five years, or here's some things I think I wanna consider. Where should I start as a good building block and a good base so that I can just add things on as our needs change or as our budget becomes available?

Uh I think that's probably one of the best things you can do for yourself if if you're interested in some of these types of solutions. Would you say that right height and in Arbon reps? Good listeners on that? Uh I think the Ride Eight network in general is great. Uh we are represented with uh an exclusive distribution network throughout the world. Some of our distributors are company owned.

uh in the United States we call that our bond, but they have other names around the world. Uh some of our distributors are independent distributors, family owned partners that uh have been around and many of them have been partners with Right Height for over forty years. So Anytime you're working with a right hide rep know that you're working with a trusted uh distributor and somebody who's gonna put your needs first.

I think we've covered off on everything that we wanted to, but if there was something else that you wanted to chat about, either with uh advancements in technology either around the loading dock or even inside the plant uh that you feel like we missed and you want to touch on. I think there's one other thing we'll circle back to the drive approach.

I mentioned there's a lot of reasons you you might find people on the drive approach. There might be a need though or a desire to try to keep people off of the drive approach altogether. And Right Height offers a system called Lockview. Uh and what LockView is, it's a camera system.

And you can either do a one or a two camera system. Uh typically it points at the rear impact guard of the trailer. That's the part of the trailer that gets secured by a dock lock. But you can also point a camera at the rear tires of the trailer. And in the case of staging trailers, that second camera also picks up the nose of the trailer, so you can tell that if a trailer stand is present.

Uh the important thing about the lock view is it comes with a monitor inside of your building so that you don't have to go outside to make sure that a vehicle is secured either with a wheel chalk or a manual restraint or even a rotating hook restraint. You know you've got positive engagement. You know a trailer is there. You can tell if a trailer stand is present.

So it really keeps people off the drive approach when they don't need to be there. And so I s I also see some technology moving in that direction where it takes things a l a step further. That okay, we can protect people when they are there, but is there really a need for them to be there at all? And I think that's something to watch out for in the future in this space. especially as uh right continues to develop products that protect people on and off the loading dock inside and outside.

All right, perfect. Well said, Chad. Well hey, thanks for being here today with us and listeners. Uh thanks for listening to to Chad talking about some loading dock safety equipment. My pleasure. If you enjoyed this episode of Right from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform. Follow right height's social media channels. Want more supply chain logistics solutions for your facility?