Warehouse Maintenance Checklist and Best Practices

To ensure the safety of your workers and to keep your storage facility in pristine condition, a warehouse maintenance checklist must be maintained round the clock and updated in real-time. This would not only save your organization a multitude of repairing costs, it would also make it a safer environment and impose fewer risks to your employees. 

Preventive Maintenance

To be able to manage a preventive maintenance plan for your warehouse you need to consider several factors. First and foremost, you need to recruit a team to manage preventive maintenance or train those that already work for you.

Training has a significant impact on your team’s productivity and your profitability because your team will know when to act and carry out the preventive maintenance plan you have chosen to implement with perfection. They will also know the proper safety guidelines and precautions to take when they implement the preventive maintenance plan.

Planned Maintenance 

It’s extremely important for you to have a preventive maintenance plan that helps you structure your maintenance and also help your managers and workers to remain one step ahead and know what happens next.

A good plan accounts for different things that can go wrong in warehouse maintenance and has separate strategies for each thing that goes wrong. Hence good preventive maintenance is planned maintenance and has a plan to be followed when everything runs smoothly as well as a contingency plan in the event of an emergency or when things don’t go according to your plan.

A warehouse maintenance plan allows you to stay on top of things and ensures that your management always knows what to do at all times. Planned maintenance also means that a preventive maintenance checklist and schedule be maintained at all times and updated in real-time so that transparency and accountability can be maintained. It also ensures that your assets have a long life and your warehouse remains a safe place. 

An Example of a Warehouse Maintenance Checklist

A good warehouse preventive maintenance plan would make sure that the following items are given importance and make their way into the warehouse maintenance checklist:

• Intact and complete safety gear
• Goods organized neatly in boxes or piled on pallets in a safe manner
• Hazard mitigation systems in order
• Clear labels for the fire exit, toxic areas, and danger zones, etc.
• Clear labels on the goods for fragile items, etc.
• Conduction of safety and fire drills
• Regularly updated protocols and operational authorizations for machines 
• Warehouse Management System that is regularly updated
• Equipment and machinery in good working condition
• Clean and unobstructed loading/unloading areas, aisles, stairways, and ramps
• Functional employees facilities
• Electrical wiring and lighting in safe and working condition
• Pest control in the warehouse
• Proper ventilation system
• Regularly updated floor plan
• Monthly evaluation of the warehouse and how the preventive maintenance plan is running

The Importance of Good Warehouse Maintenance

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Nothing explains the importance of good warehouse maintenance like this proverb does. Preventing an accident from happening is a lot easier than fixing the disaster that ensues if there is no prevention. Preventive maintenance prevents such accidents from occurring and minimizes the chances of your assets breaking down. 

Preventive warehouse maintenance is an investment!

Preventive maintenance literally brings you so many advantages, and makes such a positive impact on your cost savings and eventual profits, that its nothing short of an investment. It ensures that whatever you spend on a preventive maintenance solution comes back to you multiplied several times because you save costs in so many ways. Warehouses have valuable assets such as dock doors and forklifts, which cost quite a lot to repair once they have broken down or stopped functioning properly. 

Moreover, even if your warehouse is not owned by you, and you have rented it, even then, as renters warehouse maintenance would still be an investment. This is because it will prevent any major damage to the warehouse and even prevent any squabbles with the landlord and fines you may have to pay for the destruction of property. 

Better safe than sorry!

Warehouse maintenance poses a lot of importance on the safety of the warehouse for your employees and also for your goods and assets. A warehouse is supposed to be a safe place for all your goods. If your goods start getting rotten or broken or destroyed in some manner, then it does not remain that ‘safe’ anymore. 

Preventive maintenance ensures the safety of your employees and makes sure your goods and assets remain secure. If anything still goes wrong, the transparency in the system ensures accountability and there is always a contingency plan which goes into action if anything goes wrong. A good maintenance plan also ensures that you abide by safety standards and avoid so many medical/insurance expenses and fines imposed. 

Proper preparation prevents poor performance!

Proper preparation and a good preventive maintenance strategy not only prevents poor performance, but it also boosts performance like never before. Benefit from improved performance and productivity, and a much longer battery life. Motive power fleets, such as forklifts require proper maintenance to be able to work at full capacity and a good warehouse maintenance plan promises just that. When the batteries in such forklifts are not maintained properly, they corrode and get permanently damaged, which decreases the productivity of the forklifts as well as drives up your repair costs. 

A proper maintenance plan, however, prolongs the life of these batteries and your assets in general, as well as improves safety in the warehouse space. This brings a major improvement in the productivity and performance of not only your assets, such as forklifts, but also your workers.  

Practicing Good Warehouse Maintenance

In order to practice warehouse maintenance management in the best way and maximize the benefits derived from it, you have to give importance to certain things and avoid certain other things. 

Plan it out!

The most important thing to keep in mind is to create a brilliant maintenance plan. Everything that happens, all the benefits you derive depend on this plan. So you have to make sure that you think, and then think some more before devising the perfect preventive maintenance plan. While you plan, make sure every piece of inventory is accounted for. This will ensure that all your assets get the maintenance they deserve.

Keep your employees in the loop!

It’s extremely important to involve your management and employees in the planning and execution of your maintenance. They are the ones who will be at the center of it and they should be involved right from the beginning. This ensures they know what’s going on and feel important and also feel like they have a stake in it.

Stick to the schedule

Lastly, you have to make sure that you stick to the plan and the schedule. Since everything is accounted for and most scenarios are pre-planned and mapped out, there is very little chance for anything to go wrong. Even if something does go wrong because of unforeseen circumstances, there is always a contingency plan for reactive maintenance to fall back on.

Adopt Best Practices

Good warehouse maintenance would also mean you adopt best practices. 

These include:

• Plan procedures for picking up products to maximize efficiency
• Minimize touchpoints
• Zero reliance on manual input
• Products required more often placed accordingly
• Keep evaluating your strategy
• One SKU for each item
• Prioritize safety of the warehouse
• Vendor operations to be standardized
• Contingency Planning/ Reactive maintenance plan
• Information sharing/ Transparency
• Track KPIs
• Practice 360-degree feedback

Avoid doing this!

Like mentioned earlier, in order to practice good warehouse maintenance you have to avoid certain things. 

These include:

• Improper installation of the pallet racks
• Dock doors in poor condition because of ignorance
• Compromised safety of loading docks
• Faults in forklift batteries and forklifts

In the end…

In conclusion, proper warehouse maintenance can end up being more advantageous for you than you think. This is only achievable if you plan properly and make preventive maintenance checklists and schedules and then actually abide by them. EcoDocs Checklist Maker can be a huge help in building those perfect checklists. If you were looking for data warehouse maintenance techniques and strategies, EcoDocs can help you out there too. If you’d like to learn more, give us a shout on our number or write us an email. Or you can simply contact us here.