Back at you with Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I’m Marty and I have no idea what all I’d like to talk about today!  I’m way behind again on our Q & A but I haven’t really pulled up anything.  You know what, lets start off with our PM’s or the preventative maintenance programs or duties.  You may not know it, but our facilities keep pretty accurate records regarding the maintenance performed on our equipment.  That’s one reason our pre-trips are such a big deal, our maintenance technicians use those to address the day to day issues we document.  I was looking at a weeks’ worth of pre-trip reports today on a spotter tractor.  Its shared between two people, one works Sun, Mon, Tue and early Wednesday and the other works late Wednesday, Thur, Fri and Saturday.  So, on Tue one gentleman marked that the wipers and mirrors needed attention and the other guy, on his shift, marked everything as o.k.  Same thing happened on Wed but in the morning the sliding window needed attention and later on in the afternoon the next pre-trip was filled out as everything being fine!  I know its so easy to take those couple of minutes for granted but they are truly important.  If our unit, say an electric rider jack or our reach lift is squealing a little and its almost time for the regularly scheduled maintenance they may bring it in earlier than scheduled and put us some new brushes in it.  We all love how our equipment runs after the electric motors have been cleaned out and brand-new brushes have been put in right?  For those still utilizing brushes anyway.  I say our preventative maintenance programs are important but actually they may even be regulated.  We deserve to be operating safe equipment at all times!  A good PM program will check things like Fluid levels, tires & wheels, how do we dent so many wheels on our counterbalance lift, all our hydraulic connections, battery life and water levels, our steering boxes, load wheels, masts, chains, oh and one of the most important things for me is torqueing all our nuts, bolts and screws.  Anyone ever heard a bolt hit the ground and couldn’t find where it came from.  And on all our electric equipment everything needs to be kept tight.  Bad brushes can ruin our motors, and the same thing with loads wheels.  I’ve had to dig miles and miles of twisted up shrink wrap from drive and load wheels before.  There’s a lot of parts that need lubrication too.  Most preventative maintenance programs are written with either hours of use or clocked in hours as a scheduling indicator.  All this is important!

With all that being understood, as a supervisor sometimes it’s hard to pull a piece of equipment out of the operations to get caught up on our scheduled PM’s.  But I assure you it’s the thing to do.  I myself held a pallet jack or kept it on the floor for like 3 weeks over its hours mark and ended up ruining the battery.  It was down for over two weeks then as they had to not only replace the battery but a lot of the voltage wiring to it as well.  Just this week I had a facility call me complaining about having to purchase a $5k battery for their forklift.  The water level had been dry for what they assumed to be over 2 months.  Besides the expense it’ll be down now until the battery is built and arrives.  Of course, that pointed to bad pre-trips.  They discovered every operator had just been marking that the water levels were good.  You can bet they’ll be some discussions and re-training with that crew now.

So, pre-trips, let’s talk about that for a minute.  They do become routine to us.  But their main purpose is our safety.  Our preventative maintenance programs are designed and written for our Safety. Yes, these programs will help reduce expense and keep our machines running longer, but they deliver us operators a safe unit to perform our task with!  A good pre-trip will cover http://media.ehs.uconn.edu/Occupational/GeneralSafety/LiftTruckOperatorsPre-OperationChecklist-ElectricalPalletJack.pdf

Motor Off Checks

Fluid leaks on floor below Truck – Hydraulic Oil, Battery

Tires – Condition /Pressure

Forks, — Condition

Hand Guards – Attached

Safety Warnings – Attached (Refer to Parts Manual for Location)

Operator’s Manual in Container

Capacity Plate Attached – Information Matches Model, Serial Number and

Motor On Checks (Unusual Noises Must Be Investigated Immediately)

Service Brake – Functioning Smoothly

Steering Operation – Functioning Smoothly

Drive Control – Forward/Reverse – Functioning Smoothly

Hoist and Lowering Control – Functioning Smoothly

Horn – Functioning

Lights & Alarms (where present) – Functioning

Hour Meter – Functioning

Battery Discharge Indicator – Functioning

And OSHA.gov has some really good pre trip sheets on everything.  I like their forklift one.  Again it’ll incorporate checks for motor off and motor on.  I wont go through the whole thing but some of the high lights are:

Record of Fluid Added

ALL OPERATORS MUST BE TRAINED AND EVALUATED ON THE TYPES OF INDUSTRIAL TRUCKS AND ATTACHMENTS THEY WILL BE OPERATING.

Your Pre-trip is so important, and it’s the law.  They are required by OSHA.  We need to be doing them and we need to treat them as a legal document.  You can bet that if something happens while we’re operating them it will become a legal document!  Remember that we’re signing our name to it too.

I think us as operators sometimes think that all that responsibility falls on our maintenance technicians.  It is our job, even in a true activity-based pay situation they’ll be a component for us to do it.  Think about it, its our safety we’re talking about.

We’ll we ended up with a good topic, preventative maintenance and pre-trips, two things that helps ensure we’re productive and that we go home every day!  We’d like to hear about your PM program or what your pre-trip reports are like and how your facility handles them!  Maybe we could start a discussion in the Warehouse Equipment Operators Community group on Facebook?  And don’t forget about the WAOC Facebook and Twitter feeds, we’re easily found using that little @whseandops.  If you like the groups maybe, ask a friend to join’em.  And if their good friends I’d appreciate you recommending them to subscribe to the Podcast!  Until next week everyone be safe and lets all take our equipment’s operation seriously!