Forklifts Come With Risks. Here’s How To Minimize Those Risks and Increase Operational Efficiency

Our customers’ operational teams can quickly institute changes to risky behaviors and unsafe environmental conditions that would have previously been unknown. 

Here are just a few examples from our customers:

Reduce forklift collisions and near-misses by cutting down on unsafe ‘No-Stops’

A traffic violation is a common cause of forklift accidents. Companies are neither aware of how often no-stops are happening, nor where they are occurring most frequently. Voxel uses autonomous heatmaping to help operators identify traffic patterns and problem hotspots. Ops teams can then use these tools and insights, including video clips that identify operational causes, to make changes before incidents occur. 

This data-backed approach to identifying risks using leading indicators like near misses is far safer and more efficient than traditional hazard observation, which often relies on data from lagging indicators like previous collisions. Traditional observation also requires a massive commitment of resources to be effective. Voxel monitors work-floors 24/7 and pinpoints problem areas, so that operations teams can focus their resources on taking action and reducing risk. 

Carlex Glass used Voxel’s autonomous heatmapping to assess their floor. They quickly installed new traffic signals and more visibly-marked pedestrian walkways to reduce incidents. In under three months, they reduced no-stops by 47%.

Alphia discovered one zone in their factory that recorded nearly 200 no-stops in less than a month after going live with Voxel. They painted the zone and added a new stop sign, which reduced the no-stops to less than two per month.

Voxel’s continuous monitoring also allows for enduring safety improvements in spite of turnover. The new traffic patterns, safer behaviors and underlying data create a new foundation for our customers’ safety culture.

Eliminate “Piggybacking” by installing faster door-closing sensors

Forklift “piggybacking” is when one forklift follows another through a door or signal, creating increased likelihood of incident occurring:

• Pedestrians or other vehicles are only expecting one forklift to come through at a time; 
• The second vehicle has no time or sightline to see if its path is clear and; 
• If the first vehicle has to stop short, it will likely cause a collision.

Vertical Cold Storage discovered that piggybacking was common in a few key doorways on their floor. By installing faster door-closing sensors and dedicating time to coach drivers using videos earmarked by Voxel, the VCS team reduced forklift piggybacking by 89%.

Create safer spaces via better delineated Pedestrian Zones, Vehicle Zones

It is critical to keep pedestrians and active forklifts at a safe distance from each other. Companies believe that guidelines or minimally-marked areas are sufficient, but Voxel has found consistently that pedestrians and forklifts frequently get too close when zones are not demarcated in an incredibly clear and visible fashion.

At Piston Automotive, creating “no pedestrian zones” (based on suggestions from Voxel’s algorithm) was a large part of reducing vehicle safety incidents by 86% in three months. 

At Alphia, pedestrians and forklift drivers were confident that they were each leaving six feet of space between them when populating the same aisles. However, we saw that the space was frequently much smaller, leading to a high amount of “near misses.” And these close calls are highly correlated with an injury or property damage just waiting to happen. Alphia’s safety team had new pedestrian walkways installed, complete with physical barriers between those walkways and vehicle zones. This change was part of a strategy that led to a factory wide injury reduction rate of 83% in under one year.