What is a Warehouse Cleaning Checklist?
A warehouse cleaning checklist is a tool to help maintain the cleanliness and orderliness of a warehouse. It details the necessary cleaning tasks to perform, as well as other housekeeping, operational, and management tasks to ensure an easy-to-navigate and operate warehouse.
Why is Warehouse Cleaning Important?
When working with large shipments, inventories, and supplies, having a clean and orderly warehouse is essential. By regularly keeping your warehouse clean, you can better promote a more organized and efficient system, ensuring there are little to no delays in movement because of stray equipment, dust, disorder, and the like.
Having a clean warehouse also reduces the chance of injury and illnesses. Regularly keeping floors clean lessens the possibility of slips, trips, falls, respiratory issues, and muscle overwork. Additionally, this promotes optimal productivity in the workplace.
Warehouse cleaning is required by many safety organizations and authorities, such as the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE), as a way to keep workers free from harm.
How Do You Maintain Warehouse Cleanliness?
Some best practices for keeping your warehouse clean include the following:
- Maintaining and managing an efficient racking system
- Following a shelving system at all times
- Wiping and dusting the warehouse regularly
- Emptying waste bins and properly disposing of them
- Labeling equipment and packages and designating a proper storage system for them
- Washing down dirty areas during the day
- Inspecting your warehouse for spills, dust mites, insect infestations, and other hazards, even if there are no reports of them
- Maintaining equipment to prevent breakages and stray parts scattering about
- Clearly assign cleaning tasks to your staff and train them for it
A good general way to ensure the cleanliness of your warehouse is by maintaining and using technology. With the right technology, you can speed up your cleaning time and improve operational efficiency.
The best way to use technology for warehouse cleaning would be to use a warehouse cleaning checklist. A comprehensive warehouse cleaning checklist tailored to your warehouse’s specific needs and requirements can help you manage all your cleaning tasks, making sure you stay compliant with your set cleaning regulations. It can help with properly and clearly assigning tasks, identifying the frequency of specific tasks, and spotting issues in cleaning, maintenance, and order.
What to Include in a Warehouse Cleaning Checklist
Different warehouses will have different rooms, functions, and needs, thus also creating separate cleaning checklists. However, a typical warehouse checklist has tasks for the following aspects of a warehouse:
- General inside area
- Aisles
- Dispatch and receiving areas
- Yards
- Toilets
- Mechanical equipment
- Cold chain fridges, if applicable
- Canteen, if applicable
- Contractor status and equipment, if applicable
As a best practice, section your warehouse cleaning checklist based on these aspects, then list down a set of tasks under them to be performed in order. As different warehouses operate differently, it would be best to use a flexible digital checklist solution to create your own warehouse cleaning checklist.
Using a digital warehouse cleaning checklist also allows you to add comments to your checklist per item or section, depending on your needs and concerns. You can also add a sign-off section for inspectors or cleaning professionals to ensure the validity of the checklist, which can also help with recordkeeping.
Here is a sample digital warehouse cleaning checklist for your reference:
FAQs about Warehouse Cleaning Checklists
The employer or warehouse owner should be in charge of creating, managing, and maintaining a warehouse cleaning checklist, as they would know the warehouse best. However, dedicated cleaners, staff, and supervisors can also be responsible for warehouse cleaning checklists depending on the situation or how the warehouse operates.
You should give your warehouse a daily wipe, mop, and dust-off, the number of times per day depending on the situation. Garbage should also be sorted and disposed of daily.
Detailed dusting, wiping, and mopping of surfaces can then be done weekly, along with inventory checks. Deep cleans can be done monthly, and tasks such as equipment maintenance checks, pest control and extermination, and the like can be done as needed or as agreed upon.
All parts of a warehouse should be cleaned. However, the most important parts of a warehouse to be cleaned and prioritized are:
- Floors
- Walls
- Ceilings
- Windows
- Restrooms
- Immediate working areas
