Racking Safety

The All Seeing Eye

Unveiled at IMHX last year, a new version of RackEye builds upon many features that made the first version an indispensable part of warehouse and logistics safety.

Warehouses are busy environments, with people and vehicles competing for space to pick and dispatch orders quickly and accurately. However, warehouse managers are also under significant pressure to optimise storage to accommodate more goods and faster turnaround times – often at the expense of aisle space between warehouse racks. With less room for forklifts to manoeuvre, the chance of rack impact incidents increases and with it, the possibility of employee injuries, operational disruption and costly rack repairs. Employees will usually report more serious incidents, but what about the smaller impacts that can lead to cumulative damage? Can you be sure that you know where the hidden impact hotspots are in your warehouse? RackEye 2.0 builds upon many of the features of the original, while offering enhanced functionality thanks to new cloud-based technology. RackEye provides the solution by monitoring the health of your racking infrastructure around the clock, providing you and your team with real time notifications the instant an impact occurs. Long-term impact data reporting allows you to track incident trends, measure driver or shift performance, and identify potential issues with the design of your facility quickly, simply and conveniently from your smartphone, tablet or computer.

A complete turnkey solution for monitoring your rack health, RackEye helps you to address both the immediate challenges of racking impact incidents and your longer-term strategic objectives for optimising safety and performance within your warehouse operations. The RackEye system monitors the health of racking and provides real time notifications in the event of an impact. It works fully independently of the customer’s existing IT infrastructure. RackEye provides a leased turnkey solution for large manufacturing, logistics and distribution businesses to ensure the sustained safety of their employees, customers and equipment – without the need for significant capital expenditure.

RackEye works by actively monitoring racking infrastructure via intelligent sensors fitted to the legs of warehouse racks. If these detect that an impact has occurred, the system will pinpoint the affected rack and send an immediate SMS notification to the warehouse management team. This allows them to assess any damage immediately and take remedial action if necessary. Should an impact occur, the RackEye App will guide you step-by-step through the process of inspecting and reporting the damage to EN15635:2008 standards, providing useful directions on measuring distortion and advising you of when repairs are necessary. The App also allows you to upload photos of rack damage from your smartphone as a permanent incident record and to support you with insurance claims.

RackEye not only addresses the immediate dangers of racking damage, but also supports companies with achieving their long-term strategic warehouse objectives. The RackEye Dashboard provides detailed insight into historical impact trends, allowing users to identify impact hotspots across multiple locations, target predictive maintenance activities and address warehouse layout problems.

Live RackEye installations at customer locations have demonstrated that use of the system can lead to a substantial reduction in rack impacts and positive changes in driver behaviour. By detecting rack impacts and alerting warehouse managers the instant incidents occur, RackEye encourages forklift drivers to take greater care when loading and unloading racks. Furthermore, statistical data of when and where impacts are occurring helps warehouse managers to identify impact hotspots, as well determine when additional driver training might be required.

“This new intelligent system has been successfully running in a number of customer locations and they have been delighted with the results,” say Luke Smith, co-owner and managing director of A-SAFE said. “They are benefiting from changes in driver behaviour, detailed KPI reporting and measurement, and reductions in incidents. One customer has even reported a 75% reduction in impacts across the legs where they’ve been trialling it. It is great to see that our customers are just as enthusiastic about the enhanced system as we are. RackEye aims to transform safety in the warehouse industry in the UK and around the world.”