Maximizing Loading Dock Capacity and the Benefits that Follow
Maximizing Loading Dock Capacity and the Benefits that Follow
Pressure to Increase Throughput
Manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution facilities around the world are faced with the constant pressure to increase production and throughput to meet consumers growing demand for goods. Some facilities do this in a variety of ways such as introducing automated equipment into their manufacturing processes to reduce the amount of time to produce goods. Others redesign the layout of their working environments to optimize space and some even consider adding on to their existing buildings to accommodate the manufacturing or storage of additional goods. These are all viable solutions, but they are costly.
The Loading Dock is a Valuable Asset
The loading dock is an environment often overlooked when operation mangers are tasked with increasing throughput. Loading docks are a key part of the supply chain and are a valuable asset and should be seen as one. Loading docks are what make a site continue to operate day after day, receiving and shipping goods – impacting profits.
An inefficient loading dock impacts the amount of goods able to be received or shipped out of a facility, resulting in low facility throughput. Optimizing efficiencies in this environment will allow for increased throughput and maximized loading dock capacity.
Benefits of Maximized Capacity at the Loading Dock
Ensuring your loading docks are operating at maximum capacity will not only increase your facilities throughput but also provide several other benefits to your site such as performance optimization, increased understanding, safe working practices, and reduced costs.
Performance Optimization
Ensuring your facility is operating at maximized capacity ensures that site performance is optimized. Through the identification of inefficiencies and bottlenecks affecting your loading docks, the necessary changes can be made to optimize performance. Some examples of this include utilizing all your loading docks instead of only a select few and giving dock schedulers full visibility of which loading docks are in use or available – minimizing the risk of incorrect dock assignment.
Increased Understanding
An increased understanding of your loading dock capacity will allow for any results from changes made in dock operations to be tracked. In addition, planning dock activities will become easier as you will now be aware of your limits. Increased understanding of your loading dock will also make the facility aware if they do truly need to invest funds to expand their facility, add additional loading docks, or introduce automated technologies in other areas of the plant.
Safe Working Practices
To ensure your facility maximizes their loading dock capacity, it is critical the docks are operating in a safe manner. In the US, more than 25% of all industrial accidents occur at the loading dock while resulting in 270,000 injuries and 819 deaths. Additionally, for every accident there are about 600 near misses (EHSToday). A safe loading dock environment increases efficiencies as it reduces the risk of downtime resulting from injury or a near miss.
Reduced Cost
It is simple, not operating at maximum capacity is costly, extremely costly. Accidents coupled with inefficiencies and avoidable fines cost the US warehouse industry well over $80 billion per year. Detention fees, lack of data, poor dock utilization and manual data entry are serious problems that are affecting facilities. These issues often make it difficult to plan dock activities, hamper site performance, decrease load capacity and result in inaccurate data and high costs.
It is important to understand, measure and operate at your facility’s maximum capacity. Doing this will result in reduce costs, saving you millions of dollars annually and increasing profits.
A Solution to Maximize Loading Dock Capacity
Maximizing the capacity of the loading dock environment could be the key to success your facility is missing. Fortunately, Kirk Key Interlock Company provides a solution that allows for facilities to achieve this.
Salvo InSite is a digital add on to Kirk’s existing Salvo Loading Dock Safety System. The digital platform provides real time dock status, performance analytics, and traceability reports through a web-based software application.
With Salvo InSite, facilities can optimize performance by identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks in loading dock operations through automatic data capture and visualization – allowing loading dock capacity to be monitored 24/7. Results can be tracked by gaining a greater understanding of how operational changes are affecting loading dock performance through dashboards, historical reports and live KPI’s. With Salvo InSite, safety at the dock can be managed through site usage reports, ensuring that the loading dock safety system is being used correctly. The digital solution also reduces the costs and effort associated with manual data entry, analysis, detention fees and claims, through automatic data capture and historic traceability capabilities.
With Kirk’s Salvo Logistic Solutions facilities can make informed decisions to maximize performance, load capacity, and throughput at their facility while keeping personnel safe.
For more information about Salvo Logistic Solutions, click here.
We’ve created a simple how-to guide on how to set efficiency goals at your loading dock through 5 simple steps. You can read the how-to-guide here.