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If you are researching ways to prevent damage to doors and assets in your factory, then you are probably a victim of an expensive repair job and are looking for ways to prevent this from happening again. If this is the case, then you’re in the right place. This article is to highlight different ways that you can prevent damage to your roller shutter doors in your factory.
Roller shutter doors are a great invention allowing the rapid opening of doorways for material handling equipment, but they do have a weakness when they get hit by an FLT. It normally requires an expensive repair to get this door working again. Every year at Clarity VM, we work with hundreds of factory managers to make the factory safer and more efficient. This includes looking at ways to prevent damage by FLT.
1. Full Frame
One of the first and most obvious solutions, is to install a flexible goalpost barrier around the doorway, protecting the full doorway, and preventing damage to the mechanism at the top of the door. The full goalpost system can reach up to 6m high and is now commonplace in most factories, including freezer stores. A full frame system such as this can cost £3000-£5000 each.
2. Clatter Bars
If a goalpost system isn’t going to work for you, then maybe a clatter bar installation will prevent damage to the top of the roller shutter by alerting the driver when its forks or load is too high. A clatter bar is generally mounted on a chain, or set of chains, and can be installed with both a siren and strobe lights for maximum effectiveness. These bars are available in 2 or 3 metre lengths and typically cost around £1000 each.
Other options
If the above two options are not going to work for you, then we may need to look at a more technical solution. One customer of ours recently installed some Geo fencing software for their forklift trucks, whereby the FLT will automatically slow down when it reaches certain zones within the factory. This can be used to slow the forklift trucks down when they are working in the vicinity of your shutter doors. There are a number of manufacturers of these types of solutions, including, Alis-tech, Toyota Material Handling.
Over the span of 5 years, some may spend roughly £29,500 repairing and replacing the roller shutter doors in their warehouse, and you can see how this would be a problem over time. A short-term investment in one of the above products can save factory managers thousands of pounds in the long term.
If you would like to enquire about one of these solutions for your warehouse, fill in this short form here.