CMHDS Promotes Health & Safety to West Coast Logistics Community
CMHDS Expands NAOSH Week Involvement and Becomes NAOSH Week 2010 Supporter – The Canadian Material Handling & Distribution Society (CMHDS) is pleased to announce that it is expanding its emphasis on occupational health and safety through becoming an official NAOSH Week Supporter for the NAOSH Week 2010 campaign. CMHDS has previously supported NAOSH Week (branded in B.C. as ‘Safety and Health Week in B.C.’) and workplace safety through its annual BC Championship Forklift Rally (www.ForkliftRally.com), which is held in conjunction with NAOSH Week. This year will mark the 13th Annual Forklift Rally, with plans actively underway to add a new elite championship for competitors from BC, Washington and Oregon. Some CMHDS member companies, including Versacold and EV Logistics, already actively participate in NAOSH week, and have found it to be extremely valuable in promoting workplace safety in their operations.
What Came First, The Pallet or the Lift Truck?
This question, posed decades ago by the earliest pallet industry pioneers such as the late Bill Sardo, still comes up today. The correct answer depends on how we define “pallet.”
Pallet-like structures have been used as bases for at least a few hundred years for applications such as the safe stacking and stabilization of kegs. Let’s look at the Dictionary.com definition, which describes a pallet as “a small, low, portable platform on which goods are placed for storage or moving, as in a warehouse or vehicle.”
If one is to follow the definition at Dictionary.com, then these structures were pallets in that they were used for storage, and they did indeed predate the lift truck. They did not, however, facilitate movement of goods, which most professional definitions for pallets would prescribe to be an important part of the definition. The appearance of unit-load bases designed to move goods takes us to to the very late 1800s. The predecessor of the wooden pallet was the wooden (and iron or steel) skid, which consisted of stringers or legs fastened to a top deck. It first appeared in American factories in conjunction with the low lift truck. A crude low lift hand truck was invented in 1887 that could elevate a skid a few inches by manual means. A more durable, all-steel low lift truck design was introduced in 1909. Early lift trucks had a lift platform. The appearance of forks came later. Skids were classified as “live,” containing casters on the base for manual positioning of the skid, or “dead” if they did not have casters.
March 3rd – Logistics For Breakfast: Forklift Rally Seminar
Join us on Wednesday March 3rd as we present Logistics For Breakfast: How To Stage Your Own In-Company Forklift Rally.
Hosted & presented by the team that stages the BC Championship Forklift Rally each year, this breakfast seminar will cover all of the aspects that go into staging a forklift competition. Whether you are looking to promote safety within your company in a fun way, prepare for competition in the upcoming BC Championship Forklift Rally or just want to find out what goes into staging a forklift competition, you will find this seminar of value. All stages from inital planning to staging and scoring the event will be covered.
March 15th – SCL Breakfast Meeting
Supply Chain Optimization: Your Competitive Advantage
Industry Canada research has shown that adoption of technology in the supply chain is a key factor in gaining best-in-class status among the competition.
This is especially true in times of economic turbulence when businesses are under tremendous pressure to make tangible productivity gains while cutting costs.
Fast changing business conditions require creative business solutions at all levels of the supply chain. Rapid access to information and communications technologies means that integrated software solutions are essential, in today’s environment, to address supply chain challenges, such as risk management, out-sourcing, demand planning, inventory optimization, visibility, and vendor collaboration.
