Welcome back to Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I\u2019m Marty and it\u2019s that time of year where we typically see Opportunities for employment picking up within our Industry. With summer vacations winding down and Schools gearing up many markets may experience hiring Opportunities and maybe some movement within our departments and promotions to other tasks or duties! In Distribution this is kind of prime time for Order Selectors, Runners, Haulers or really any position on the outbound or shipping side of the operations. We\u2019ve had several questions from our recent episodes where we have discussed the electric pallet jacks and the positions of Selecting or picking so I thought we\u2019d hit the high points of Outbound today. I\u2019m actually traveling this week and have been fortunate enough to run into our Safety Guru or WAOC\u2019s go to Safety Official so Joe is here and he\u2019ll help us with some Equipment Safety Practices and share his thoughts with this time of year Outbound wise.
\nJoe, Thanks for sitting in and visiting with us today!
\nJOE \u2013 Great to be here especially in this beautiful Colorado weather!!! Marty, things here in the Denver area are really booming in the warehousing and distribution fields.
\nI\u2019ve seen it too and yes the weather is awesome. Last week I was in Arizona at 116 and this morning\u2019s 58 felt great! It\u2019s a bit noisy here today, Hotels and Distribution Docks aren\u2019t the best locations to podcast from but sometimes the best content comes when the opportunity presents itself right!
\nSince I have you here I\u2019d like to talk about the respect an Electric Pallet Jacks demand from us. I personally know of at least 5 instances, all from different companies and across several states thank goodness from well ran organizations where a strong Safety Culture is a daily practice with the crews, I mean an incident can happen anywhere and at any time I guess. Two of the injuries occurred where a hand was smashed, one - when the jack was ran into another piece of equipment & another where the jack was ran into the racking structure. Thankfully neither was to serious but severe enough where the individuals lost time and pay and had to deal with an accident investigation. Ankles and feet has had their share of incidents too. I heard of two different gentlemen that rolled over their own feet trying to creep their rider jacks instead of riding them to the next stop or slots. Luckily neither of them was seriously injured as they both were wearing steeltoe boots. One man really hurt himself though, his foot being caught between the jack and some racking. I think he missed several weeks of work, I believe he\u2019s fine now but his injury could have been much worse. It\u2019s so easy to take the dangers for granted when we\u2019re performing our task day in and day out but we have to respect these machines.
\nJOE - Marty, when I give an equipment class one of the things I always stress is situational awareness. As an equipment operator, you need to always be on the lookout for people in general. The moment an operator stops doing that, they open up the realm of possibilities. I actually know about one of the incidents you mentioned, and the only reason I remember it was because it actually was not the operators fault yet he injured his hand! I think as this guy was taking his jack to charge right in front of the jack there was an oil spill that prevented him from stopping pinning his hand between the jack and a hard place! That situational awareness is very key in operations.
\nYep, \u201cThe old saying Look before moving the first inch is an important one!\u201d
\nI\u2019m seeing so many ad\u2019s for really all kinds of Outbound positions right now - how about we talk about a few of those positions, kind of summarize their duties and tasks I guess. The first one that comes to mind is order selecting. When we\u2019re working the outbound side of things that very well could be the position we have our eyes on,