4 Tips to Proper Warehouse Maintenance
If you own an industrial facility, your warehouse is one of the most crucial parts of your business. Keeping your warehouse up-to-date and properly maintained can increase the longevity of your warehouse, while also providing a safer work environment for your employees that operate within it. In this guide, we discuss tips and best practices that will ensure you are implementing proper warehouse maintenance in your industrial facility.
Warehouse Maintenance Tips and Best Practices
1. Facility Inspections
Facility inspections are one of the most crucial tasks to perform when it comes to proper warehouse maintenance. Quality inspections can help you identify small problems within the warehouse before they become bigger problems, saving you time and money. Create a plan with your warehouse manager to identify common problem areas that need to be inspected regularly, and ensure your inspector works down the checklist so that nothing is missed. Some common problem areas we often see with warehouses are industrial flooring, warehouse walls, chipping paint, moisture exposure, machinery leaks, and poorly planned line striping.
2. Cleaning and Sanitization
Ensuring your warehouse is regularly cleaned is a great form of preventative maintenance that can increase the lifespan of your warehouse, and mitigate the risks associated with the daily activity of your employees. Spills should be cleaned up immediately, and it is a good idea to dust-mop your facility at least once a week. Warehouses are notorious for dust build-up, which can reduce the performance of your machinery, and poses a serious health risk to your employees. Hand sanitizer and wash stations are always a good idea to have readily accessible around your facility, as germs and bacteria can be detrimental to your workforce. Wok with your warehouse manager to discuss regularly scheduled cleaning, and discuss the use of non-acidic or non-basic cleaners that won’t harm any protective coatings you have applies to your facility.
3. Training and certifications
Ensuring the employees you have working around your warehouse are properly trained and certified on any machinery/processes you will be using is always crucial to maintaining your warehouse. Unsafe actions from unqualified employees can cause disasters in the warehouse, leading to a host of legal problems and additional costs. The best way to prevent this is to familiarize yourself with any specialized training or certifications that a piece of machinery might require, and ensure your warehouse manager enforces the notion that only property trained/certified individuals can operate this machinery. This goes a long way towards keeping your warehouse intact, and your employees safe.
4. Pest Control
Rodents, insects, bees, and other pests are harmful to your warehouse for many reasons. First and foremost, you owe it to your employees to ensure their working environment is rid of any pests that can harm them, or potentially spread disease. Another reason why pests can cause a huge problem in your warehouse is the damage they can do to the structural integrity of your facility. R=For instance, rodents burrough within your walls, and termites can weaken the integrity of your wooden structures. For maintenance, it is best to add this to your list of inspections, and call an exterminator if you should find any presence of pests within your facility.
How McLean Company Can Help
McLean Company offers industrial flooring and painting services that aid in the battle of maintaining your warehouse. From masonry waterproofing services that reduce the amount of moisture within your facility, to line striping services that will promote a safer flow of operations within your warehouse, our services help ensure your warehouse remains fully functional for decades to come. We can also help you calculate your floor load capacity to see if your current flooring is sufficient.
If you have discovered a problem within your facility that requires the expertise of an industrial painting and flooring contractor, contact McLean Company today for a fee quote on your maintenance project.