Ep. #8: Warehouse and Distribution Center Safety Trends

From the Source features John Hargarden, who is a regional sales vice president with Wright Height. He talks about common challenges. every day and solutions to address those challenges. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on productivity, energy savings, and environmental Commercial facility. Hello listeners. Today we have with us John Hargarden, who is the Regional Sales Vice President at Right Height. Hi John. Good morning.

Nice to have you on the show today. So first off, let's learn a little bit about what the regional sales vice president of Right Eye does. All right. Well I've been uh I've been in the industry for thirty seven years and thirty two of those years with Right Height. And my main role currently is to operate as a liaison between Right Height, the manufacturer, and our customers.

by supporting our local representatives. Um I currently support our representatives in Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and uh our independent dealer in um the Twin Cities. What kinds of customers are you servicing? I'm calling on a wide variety of customers. I have had in the last ten years a lot of focus in supporting three to four key automotive parts companies that are are in the US.

So I work a lot with the automotive parts distribution companies, but I call on a wide variety of industries because they're all located in the my geographical area. As far as distribution centers go, there's a facility manager typically. What kinds of things does he or or she do? Uh what's what's their role?

Their role is to is to service their customers as efficiently, safely as possible. Input and output's important in the distribution center. Handling products with less moves, I think, is important to a lot of those individuals. And those facility folks really depend heavily on their their safety teams also within those facilities to make sure that they're meeting or exceeding the requirements to ultimately keep their employees safe.

And we bring a lot of value to the table by offering solutions that can help them meet those goals. What kinds of things typically happen in those distribution centers and what kinds of uh trends are really shifting how operations uh work in in distribution centers? In a lot of cases customers are looking for consistency.

And they're looking for ways to have every dock door as an example, uh, operate in a in a similar fashion. And I think a lot of customers today are really looking at interlocking a lot of their systems at the dock. to make sure that the trucks are being sequenced in and sequenced out identically at each door. So that consistency also helps contribute to a higher level of safety. I think that's been very important to a lot of customers.

When it comes to to safety, if we can kind of dive down that avenue, what kinds of things are are your customers really asking for from you and and sales representatives out in the the northwest area of of the States? I think this is really delves into the reason we as a company are innovators. We listen to our customers' needs and we recognize that if they come to us with a possible issue

that could affect the safety of their employees. We take that to heart at right height and we develop compelling solutions in a lot of cases to address those issues. So in in a lot of cases we've been very successful in preventing catastrophic accidents from occurring with the dock lock safety system and our our safety lip leveler that protects uh employees from going off the edge of a dock when a truck's not present. We've developed some compelling solutions.

that can protect employees on and off work lifts, both inside and outside the building. And one other thing that's worth mentioning is that, you know, budgets are budgets out there. And sometimes customers can't necessarily go all in at the beginning of a process. But the beauty behind what we're doing is we're developing these compelling solutions that if they can only put a certain level in at a certain time, as part of a continuous improvement process, they can add these other features.

to further enhance safety and reduce risk in their facilities as time goes by and budgets allow. And I think that's that flexibility is something that a lot of facilities are looking for.

Now a lot of the solutions that you mentioned are they responses simply to customers or are there any kind of safety regulations that are changing in the industry or any focuses or emphases that uh industry standards are are moving toward? There are minimal standards that are out there that are prescribed by OSHA as an example. I mean, wheel trucks are a minimal requirement.

But the dock lock is an example, which is a vehicle restraint and and we lead the industry in this in this particular category. Goes well beyond a wheelchap. There's many other s safety solutions that I've kind of alluded to that that we've developed that aren't the result direct result of OSHA requirements. It's more the result of a customer first and foremost wanting to protect their employees' well being.

Secondly, increase the input and output speed while protecting their employees' well-being. And ultimately, the value that we bring to any customer is our ability to lower their cost of goods sold by reducing risk. Let's say you're the manager of a distribution center. What safety standards are you looking at, thinking about kind of on a daily basis?

First and foremost with all the material handling equipment that's in the facilities, I wanna keep those motor operated machines. I wanna prevent those machines from running over anybody. We basically make a lot of solutions that can help separate forklift traffic from pedestrians walking along. So At the dock, consider this. When a trailer backs up to a building, it actually becomes an integral part of a warehouse or distribution or manufacturing facility. The big difference is it's on wheels.

So how do I control the movement of that semi trailer and put that control in the hands of my employees? I I wanna make sure that uh I'm putting the right enclosures around the door so I don't have driving rain and water coming in on the dock because slips, trips, and falls are a major concern of a lot of our customers. So how do I keep the dock drier?

so that I don't offer, you know, higher risk to my employees. So are there enclosures that can go around the door that are better suited towards a a working environment that can operate at a high level of productivity?

Now you've mentioned a lot of things at the loading dock and a a few things on the interior of the plant. Uh can you talk about some of the solutions that uh Right Height is currently developing or has developed that can help with things like aisleways and and blind intersections that can happen in in distribution centers. Interestingly, we have a lot of customers that have deployed blue light technology on forklifts. In some cases, uh we have some that put uh red light.

on their forklifts. But the the idea behind that is that sends a beam off of a forklift that sticks out, you know, anywhere from twelve to fifteen feet. So if a forklift's coming down an aisle, uh, and they see a blue light, they know that something might be coming. But you only have seconds to react. So

We thought that boy enhancing these intersections uh with safety systems that better communicate to people about the traffic that's that could converge in that intersection would be a good idea. So we've come up with product

uh our safety signal, which is an LED plug and play intersection caution signal that is not designed to replace what customers have done with their forklifts. It's only designed to enhance what they've already deployed in their facilities. So If I'm coming towards a intersection and somebody else is coming towards an intersection, I'm gonna get a stop sign in LED lights, uh the forklift operator or person will get a stop.

stop light uh or stop sign as well, and a blue light will deploy. If there's two or more events that occur at an intersection, this blue light will deploy to the floor. So Customers are already familiar with that technology are they're saying, hey, this is a great solution for us for these high traffic areas.

So that's one product that's really taken off for us. And then we have barrier systems, all kinds of barrier systems. Again, different price points, different budgets, they do different things. We can put in more permanent steel type fixtures to again

Take those lines up off the floor that you have to paint every couple of years. And we can create aisleways for customers. We can put swing gates in for customers. This is a hot topic uh in in the automotive parts business for some of the customers I deal with. It's not one size fits all. It's it's really our ability to go in, take a look at what the customer is looking to achieve, and then develop the best solution for them depending on uh what they're trying to accomplish.

Did you wanna talk about any trends specifically in the automotive parts industry for us, John? A couple of the companies that I'm working with right now are are really trying to enhance that safety as I mentioned, uh both on the approach as well as on the dock. So a lot of the view products that we've developed as a result of customer feedback are being deployed as part of standards. So we help customers actually develop written standards.

for their organization, depending on what their goals are. They'll actually ask us to go out and do very thorough, comprehensive assets. And this has been a huge powerful tool for our customers because we can go out and capture information that's important to them as to the condition of their current facility.

and then come back with a report that's extremely comprehensive, along with any solutions we would have, depending on where their issues might be. And they may not even be aware of some of the issues till we get to a particular facility. But we could raise these concerns and then give them a roadmap. We can give them a forecast of how they can make wholesale continuous improvement. The big thing that Right Height brings is we are looking for long lasting partnerships.

with clients. We are also have the ability worldwide to project manage and support through our enterprise across state lines or country lines, we we're able to offer the synergy that many companies are hungry for. We're we're able to do this with single point of contact. So we make the process of making these wholesale changes or considering wholesale changes, we make the process easier for our customers.

And ultimately we can identify where these key concerns are and then address them proactively with our customers, whether it's in Europe or the North American market or Asia. We can help develop those relationships. Well John, we appreciate you being on today's show. Uh you've been listening to right from the source, the right hype podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of Write from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and follow Right Height's

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