Latest / The Operations Podcast with Fexingo: Process, People, and Profit in Modern Business / How a 3PL Cut Forklift Accidents by 60 Percent
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's a number that's been stuck in my head all week: a third-party logistics provider in Ohio cut forklift accidents by sixty percent in nine months. And they didn't do it by hiring more safety managers or doubling the training budget. Luna: Okay, I'm intrigued. What did they do—install cameras on every fork? Lucas: Actually, that was part of it, but the real story is a layered approach. They retrofitted proximity sensors to all ninety forklifts, geofenced the high-traffic aisles so speeds are automatically limited, and they rolled out a peer to peer near-miss reporting app that changed how the whole warehouse thinks about safety. Luna: Wait, peer to peer reporting? Isn't that just tattling on your coworkers? Lucas: That's the key twist. It's not about getting someone in trouble. It's anonymous, and the goal is to catch close calls before they become injuries. In the first month, they got over two hundred reports. And that's when the culture started to shift. Luna: So the near-miss reports led to the sixty percent drop? Seems too simple. Lucas: Not exactly. The reports helped them spot patterns—like a specific blind corner near the dock doors, or a certain time of day when fatigue spiked. Then they could fix the physical environment, not just remind people to be careful. Luna: I like that. So the technology was just the data collection layer. The real fix was operational. Lucas: Right. And the numbers back it up. In the nine months before, they had fifty-two accidents. After the changes, twenty-one. That's a sixty percent reduction, and it's held for two full quarters. Luna: You mentioned insurance savings earlier. How does that factor in? Lucas: Their workers comp premiums dropped by roughly thirty-five percent. They also avoided three lost-time claims that they would've had at the old rate—each of those can cost anywhere from fifty to a hundred grand. So the ROI on the sensor retrofit was under a year. Luna: And what about the veterans in the warehouse? I imagine some folks didn't love being told to slow down. Lucas: That was the hardest part. They had a few operators with twenty-plus years who saw it as a slap in the face. So the operations lead—a guy named Dave—spent two weeks on each shift, riding along, listening, and tuning the sensitivity levels. He gave the veterans a say in the settings. Luna: So he turned the skeptics into the champions. Lucas: Exactly. One of the first near-miss reports came from a twenty-five-year veteran. He saw a new hire about to back into a rack, called it out, and later said that app made him feel like his gut instincts finally mattered. Luna: That's the kind of story you can't get from a spreadsheet. Lucas: The other thing they did was link safety bonuses to the whole team, not the individual. So if the warehouse goes a month without a reportable incident, everyone gets a small bump. No more one-person gets blamed, everyone loses their bonus. Luna: That's a clever way to kill the blame game. Lucas: And it works. They went from fifty-two incidents to twenty-one, and the severity dropped even more. The lost-time injury rate fell by seventy percent. Luna: Let's talk numbers for a second. What did the whole thing cost—sensors, app, geofencing? Lucas: Roughly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But they saved about four hundred thousand in avoided claims and premium reductions in the first year alone. And that doesn't include the softer stuff like retention. Luna: How did retention factor in? Lucas: Turnover in the warehouse dropped from around forty percent to twenty-eight percent. People want to work somewhere they're not scared to get hurt. Luna: That's something HR can sell in recruiting. Lucas: And the CFO noticed that their insurance broker started treating them differently. They were able to negotiate a lower rate because they had data showing the risk profile had improved. Luna: Data gives you leverage in every conversation, doesn't it? Lucas: It does. And it's not just the insurance. They also saw a productivity bump—about five percent—because they weren't losing time to accidents and the rework that comes with damaged goods. Luna: So safety is a profit center, not just a cost center. Lucas: That's the big takeaway. And if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many of these. Luna: Yeah, it keeps us ad-free and independent, which feels right for a show about operations. Lucas: And if you're running a facility and thinking about this, the first step isn't buying sensors. It's getting the near-miss reporting going. That's the cheap, high-impact starting point. Luna: Any advice on how to get people to actually use it? Lucas: Dave, the ops lead, had a simple rule: no report is ever used to punish. And he backed it up by wiring the bonus structure to team performance, not individual blame. Once people saw that, the reports started flowing. Luna: So it's about trust, not surveillance. Lucas: Exactly. The technology is just the vehicle. The culture is the engine. Luna: And now they're expanding this to their other three sites. How's that going? Lucas: They started with the smallest site, where the culture was already decent. They got early wins, then used that as a template. The second site is about halfway through, and they're seeing similar drops—though not as dramatic, because they started from a lower baseline. Luna: That's a smart rollout plan. Prove it somewhere, then scale. Lucas: And they're also sharing the data across sites. Each site can see how the others are doing, and there's a friendly competition to see who can go the longest without a recordable. Luna: A little healthy competition never hurts. Lucas: So if you're in operations, the question isn't whether you can afford to invest in safety. It's whether you can afford not to.