As a safety health & environmental manager for L’Oreal, Donna Muniz’s job is to keep employees working safely in a Piscataway, NJ production plant operated by the cosmetics giant. She considers job safety a way of life.
Safety was at the top of Muniz’s mind after hearing of a tragic accident in a nearby automotive distribution facility, where a forklift retrieving a pallet from a high shelf had inadvertently dislodged a pallet on the shelf behind it. The unseen pallet fell, fatally striking a man working in the adjacent aisle.
Muniz’s immediate reaction was to call a safety meeting with all the forklift drivers. She wanted them to know about the accident, to understand how it happened, and to recognize the importance of due caution in the warehouse.
She also began researching racking security systems. None of the proposals she saw was completely satisfactory, however. Then, on a chance visit to a Home Depot store, she noticed a heavy duty plastic netting, visibly different from the systems she was considering, that the store had installed behind its racks (shown here).
Finding the Right Solution
An inquiry led her to Karen Slater, sales manager for Industrial Netting of Minneapolis, MN. The company specializes in producing industrial netting, mesh, and tubes for a wide range of applications. David Brentz, vice president marketing & sales, says the company has been responding to customer requests for novel containment solutions for over 25 years. Industrial Netting now offers specialty plastic meshes designed for uses as varied as filtration components, pest control, and scrap metal containment. Most recently, the company had introduced its RackGuard product, specifically for the safe containment of warehoused goods.
“RackGuard is an engineered thermoplastic net, or grid, made from high performance polymers to produce the high tensile strength and dimensional stability necessary to protect warehoused goods from falling,” says Brentz. “As an extruded mesh, RackGuard achieves a significant saving in material, compared to knotted netting, and can also be cut easily to any size.”
After talking over the needs at L’Oreal, Slater referred Muniz to Chip Merritt, vice president sales & marketing at J & D Associates in Middletown, PA, a designer, manufacturer, and installer of motorized storage systems and related material handling products. “One of Muniz’s concerns was to have a single vendor responsible for the complete project,” said Slater. “We have worked with Chip and his people before, so we were very confident that J & D would be able to deliver the level of service L’Oreal needed.”
“Muniz really wasn’t happy with the choices she had seen so far,” Merritt recalls. “They were all based on traditional 8 x 10 ft steel grids screwed flush to the back of the pallet racks. We discussed combining the RackGuard plastic mesh with steel pallet stops that, in effect, create a vertical rail system standing off 3 in. behind the shelves. The plastic mesh attaches to the pallet stops and, together, they offer a superior containment at a comparable cost.”
Protecting Against Loose Items
With the RackGuard and stops recessed back from the racking, a conventional 48 in. pallet has room to balance evenly on standard 42 in. shelves. The stops prevent pallets from pushing material off the shelf in the row behind, while the RackGuard netting ensures that loose items can’t fall into the next aisle or into the flue area between racks.
“This netting has a very attractive appearance compared to steel fencing or wire mesh,” says Chip Merritt. “This can be especially important to a company like L’Oreal, which has a certain aesthetic image to maintain. What makes RackGuard even more attractive to most facilities, though, is how easily it keeps looking good!”
RackGuard’s high-tensile strength polymer material is immune to dents and corrosion. It has exceptional dimensional stability, so it holds its shape well after absorbing impacts. The zip-tie connectors that attach RackGuard to J & D’s pallet stops are as strong as the mesh itself, and help to distribute impact loads evenly. In comparison, the security provided by a steel grid is only as strong as the screws drilled into the racking.
As J & D has seen in other installations, the good appearance of RackGuard is more than skin deep.
“Warehouse people all know how quickly steel security nets show their age,” says Chip. “And we all know how costly repairing or replacing these grids can be over the life of the facility. If, for some reason, you do have to repair a tear in RackGuard netting or if you’re moving your shelving around, all you need is a pair of shears and some zip ties! Ultimately, it’s a huge saving in maintenance costs and downtime.”
The Right Vendor Makes a Difference
It’s an important difference for the L’Oreal facility in Piscataway. With over 6,000 linear feet of 20 ft high racking, the L’Oreal warehouse is a large and extremely busy facility. And because the focus of the plant is production, not distribution, the warehouse is constantly challenged to keep up with maintenance needs with minimal downtime. “When production needs the space,” Muniz says, “we have to keep it clear!”
“J & D was really good to work with,” she continues. “One reason we chose them is that they do the complete job themselves, without subbing out to other contractors. They had complete control of the project. They understand the demands on a facility like ours and spent the time with our people to work around our production scheduling.” Chip Merritt credits the system itself with some of the flexibility he can offer at installation. “Instead of handling bulky steel panels,” he explains, “our stops are very compact and easy to manage. We can pre-cut the plastic netting to whatever size we need before we go in; we just tag it for the assemblers and ship it out in rolls.”
After the installation was complete, the warehouse staff was still on Muniz’s mind.
“After our meeting about the death in the other warehouse, you could see a difference in how they did their jobs. But now I can see their confidence in the facility is back. Our forklift operators say that loading and unloading pallets is a bit easier now. They tell me that they feel safer with the new containment system in place. And they feel like L’Oreal management really does care about their safety.”