In today's commercial work environment, few things are more important to making things run smoothly than the simple transportation of goods between entities. These days, most of the things used every day come from all over the country and around the world - whether that be milk, eggs, bread, gasoline, cars, tires, or anything else you can imagine. There are many different industries involved in selling stuff to us - there's the production of the items, the selling of the items, and of course, the middleman: getting the product from the producer to the consumer.
Bayou Dock & Door Inc
(225) 791-5104
34620 La Highway 16
Denham Springs, LA
Flexion Material Handling
(504) 736-9508
1100 Edwards Ave
New Orleans, LA
Overhead Door Company of New Orleans Inc
(504) 822-0345
1401 S Broad St
New Orleans, LA
Deep South Equipment Co Trucks
(318) 621-9000
6851 Greenwood Rd
Shreveport, LA
In America, the majority of overland transportation occurs by truck. Even if a product takes a voyage first in an airplane, train or cargo ship, it usually ends up taking a ride in some kind of truck. If you look at any retail store of reasonable size or at the enormous warehouses many companies use as middle points to collect product before shipping it to retail locations across the country, you’re going to find facilities to move product from the truck into the store or warehouse. That’s not easy – it takes a lot of workers to move individual boxes, and it would really be a pain if people were just picking things up out of the back of the truck and carrying it in through the front door; thus, the invention of the loading dock. In a single-truck kind of facility, a loading dock generally consists of a large door for the truck to back up to and a roller rack to quickly and efficiently move things from the truck to the ground. Product is usually placed on palettes that can then be easily moved with a forklift or pneumatic cart.
Larger loading docks, such as those used in large warehouses, malls, or the various “super” retail centers that seem to be popping up everywhere these days, often need a little more than just a door and loading ramp. Obviously, one of the main difficulties in unloading freight from a truck is the height of the truck. Most truck beds are several feet off the ground. Because of this, many loading bay designs have ramps leading up to the standard truck bed level. This isn’t always precisely the right height, and there’s still a gap between the truck and the edge of the dock. For that reason, many loading bays use a piece of equipment called a dock leveler to bridge the gap and make it easy for a forklift to drive directly into the back of a truck and offload entire palettes of product with very little difficulty. Imagine the difference between unloading a truck by hand as opposed to moving tons of material at a time with a forklift, and you’ll see just how important good loading dock equipment is.
Sometimes, unfortunately, there are middle grounds between small establishments and the very big ones. In those cases, you might not have a fully outfitted loading dock or even good loading dock equipment, but still have a truck that’s too large to unload easily by hand with only a few workers. In those cases, you might want to get a piece of loading dock equipment called a yard ramp. A yard ramp works when the loading dock doors aren’t of the right sort to work directly with the back of a truck, or can even be used with the loading dock door if there is no concrete door or dock leveler available to allow the forklift into the truck. Loading dock design that makes use of yard ramps should take loading dock safety into consideration in its design.
A yard ramp is simply a long – usually ten or twelve yards – ramp that extends from the ground into the bed of the cargo truck. That ramp allows a forklift to ascend safely into a truck and easily offload palettes even without some of the heavier pieces of loading dock equipment. Always take loading dock safety into consideration when working with a yard ramp. A person can walk up a ramp into a truck without any trouble at all. A thousand-pound forklift carrying a two-ton crate of cleaning fluid, on the other hand, might have a little more trouble. Make sure a ramp is safely situated, because failure to do so puts your equipment and, more importantly, your employees at risk.