Loading bays are generally an extremely busy area for any warehouse, logistics or distribution business. The need to keep up with goods arriving and departing is essential to the smooth running of your business. Yet it is an area often overlooked when it comes to updating equipment and ensuring that safety measures are the best they can be. Modern technology has upped the game, so now could be the time to look at the many solutions that bring greater safety without compromising efficiency. Workflows can be improved with the inbuilt safety aspects, such as traffic lights, barriers, vehicle-to-ground yard lifts, dock levellers, and double deck lifts such as those available from leading loading bay solutions manufacturers.
How to Choose
Making the right choice from the range of overhead sectional doors, universal dock doors, dock levellers, double deck lifts, and vehicle-to-ground yard lifts is essential to maximise efficiency and output whilst keeping those working on loading and unloading vehicles or moving goods to or from your site safe. So we would always recommend chatting with experts in delivering tailored loading bay solutions to get the best of what is on offer.
Streamlining operations can be challenging to adapt existing unit setups and workflows to keep up with safety without compromising speed and efficiency, so the advent of modular plug-and-play loading bay equipment solutions could be the answer to make the changes that better protect those working in the area and ensure that goods can be loaded and unloaded or moved around your building with maximum safety for the products, equipment and personnel.
What Options Do I Have?
There are various options open to you in terms of the equipment you can install. Here, we list a few popular choices.
- Vehicle to Ground Yard Lifts: These lifts offer an instant plug-and-play solution to load and unload lorries and vans of all types. Whether your business caters to double deck artics, home delivery vans or a combination, a V2G lift brings the ultimate level of loading safety. Units from leading suppliers arrive as a surface mountable modular load house pod, which doesn’t require extensive groundwork to fit. Each unit can typically be installed on your warehouse floor or yard in less than a day. Units are sealed to the building exterior and can optionally provide a temperature-controlled loading environment. They are a proven safer alternative to forklift and tail lift loading, which will also improve loading times. Included safety features can offer fully automated lockable exclusion zones, loading lamps and interior lighting, segregated walkways and optional doors to ensure enhanced efficiency doesn’t mean neglecting safety.
- Double Deck Lifts: falls from height or being hit by a falling object are two of the biggest causes of fatalities and injury to personnel within the logistics sector, so ensuring those loading & unloading vehicles safely has to be high on the priority list. The guidance highlights the need to incorporate safety lighting, vehicle restraints, guards and skirting plates to ensure safety. A double-deck lift enables efficient and safe loading of double-deck trailers from a secure raised dock. It can also offer compatibility with other vehicle types, with lift speeds faster than tail lift loading or using a scissor lift platform.
- Dock lifts: A cost-efficient solution to improve safety in a loading dock, especially those where palletised goods are involved. You can tailor the size of your lift to the optimum size for your business, with options likely to include those for 2,4 or 6 pallets. An automatic surround fall-prevention system and interlocking safety gates offer advanced safety standard measures that fully comply with the requirements for CE marking, BS/EN and Machinery Directive standards.
Loading bay safety can be improved by adding restraint systems and specialist loading bay equipment. This will help to remove the risk of vehicle creep. Furthermore, an automatic hydraulic system eliminates the possibility of the vehicle leaving the loading dock before personnel have finished.
