This is not another “we’re open for business article”, it’s more a reality check on what business will look like in the months, possibly years, ahead.
As we welcome our full team back to work we know we have a lot to do to keep our team safe, healthy and happy. Working with a skeleton crew for the past few months, mostly from home, it’s been easy to keep to social distancing rules. Moving forward, things might be a little trickier.
Simple practicalities make it almost impossible to operate at the same pace in most production environments. We’ve already been reorganising our workshops to help maintain production flow and speed whilst adhering to the rules.
If you’re working in a production environment and you’re working out how you can reorganise to keep people safe, I can help. Here are 3 ways you can adapt your production space to support social distancing. If I can help you implement these ideas, just give our experts a call.
1. Clear routes around the production space
A one-way system is straightforward, but it will slow you down – it’s unavoidable. Your team will have to take ‘the long route’ to every component and part they need. To speed things up and if space allows, you could have two lanes, to enable team members to pass each other.
2. Reorganise your storage space
If you’re introducing one-way systems or zones to reduce foot traffic, consider which parts are stored where. Is there an ‘exit’ from the one-way system near the most frequently visited shelves or storage machines?
Many businesses we support have a centralised storage area
This is good for organisation and productivity, but poor for maintaining social distancing. It might be helpful to have several parts storage areas in your production space.
If you need to move storage carousels or storage shuttles, please give our team a call. Our specialists can help you relocate your machines. Please do not attempt to move your machines without specialist help. If the mechanisms inside the machine are damaged it could lead to a costly repair – or worse a replacement machine.
3. Transfer parts from racking to a storage machine
With a storage machine holding hundreds, sometimes thousands of parts, your team can access inventory quickly from a single location. Fast picking will reduce wait times and team members will benefit from fewer steps to retrieve the components they need.
We’re specialists in automated storage, so if you need any guidance, please pick up the phone and call 0116 277 0099.
We’re here to help you, and companies like yours get back to business. Please forward this article to anyone you feel we can support in getting back to business.