By DAVE DALLESKE | Senior Vice President of Sales, U.S. | A-SAFE, Inc.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time walking warehouse floors across the U.S. — from high-volume distribution centers to complex manufacturing sites. Most leaders I meet can tell you exactly how many pallets move per hour or how labor efficiency is trending.
What they usually can’t tell you is how facility damage is costing in downtime. Not because they don’t care, but because their team has learned to work around it.
Forklift impacts. Racking strikes. Damaged columns. Bent barriers.
These incidents are treated as maintenance problems. Fix it. Paint it. Move on. But after seeing the same damage repaired in the same places again and again, it becomes clear: this isn’t random, and it certainly isn’t unavoidable.
Downtime is not an exception in modern warehouses. It is a predictable outcome of how most facilities are designed.
The Real Causes of Warehouse Downtime
In my experience, downtime almost never comes from major failures. It comes from small, all-too-common events that happen every single day.
- Constant Vehicle Movement: Warehouses today are built around continuous forklift traffic. Tight aisles, blind corners, shared pedestrian routes — especially during peak shifts — make low-speed impacts almost inevitable. Even in well-run operations, something eventually gets hit.
- Infrastructure Built to Resist Impact: Most traditional steel barriers and bollards are designed to resist force, not manage it. When they’re struck, the energy doesn’t disappear — it transfers into floors, anchors, vehicles, or the structure itself. The damage isn’t prevented; it’s just pushed somewhere else, often where repairs are more expensive and disruptive.
- A Reactive Mindset: I still see many facilities fixing damage instead of asking why virtually the same impact keeps happening. When the same column or aisle end is repaired multiple times a year, that’s not bad luck: it’s a design flaw that’s continuously ignored.
Why Small Impacts Create Big Disruptions
One of the biggest misconceptions I see is the idea that “minor” collisions don’t matter.
They do.
When a barrier bends or a structural element is struck, the ripple effects are immediate: aisles get closed, inventory access is limited, maintenance teams are pulled off planned work, and temporary fixes are put in place just to keep things moving.
What starts as a small impact almost never stays small. Over time, these disruptions become normal. Downtime gets baked into daily operations, and no one questions it anymore.
The Cost Most Facilities Don’t Fully See
The price of a replacement barrier or rack repair is easy to track. The real cost is everything that happens around it: lost labor hours, missed throughput targets, delayed shipments, emergency maintenance, and increased risk exposure.
When you multiply that by dozens — or hundreds — of impact events each year, facility damage becomes a real operational cost, not a rounding error.
Patterns I See Repeated Everywhere
After walking hundreds of sites, the patterns are hard to ignore:
- The same columns repainted again and again
- Steel barriers bent back into place instead of replaced
- Floor anchors loosening after repeated hits
- Forklifts taking secondary damage from rebound energy
- Operators quietly changing routes to avoid problem areas
These aren’t training problems. They’re design problems.
Rethinking Protection: Managing Energy, Not Fighting It
This is where the shift from steel to advanced polymer protection matters.
Steel systems resist impact but deform permanently. Polymer systems are designed to absorb and dissipate energy, then recover. That difference alone reduces secondary damage, repeat repairs, and unplanned downtime.
This isn’t about materials. It’s about whether your facility is designed to fail repeatedly — or recover quickly.
Downtime Is a Design Decision
Facilities that reduce downtime don’t rely on perfect driving. They design for reality. They protect high-risk areas with systems that expect impact and manage it without shutting operations down.
When damage stops causing disruption, maintenance becomes predictable, and productivity stabilizes.
A Final Thought
The industry has become very good at fixing damage, and very bad at asking why it keeps happening…
Downtime doesn’t disappear on its own. But when facilities stop treating damage as a maintenance issue and start treating it as an operational design challenge, it becomes something that can actually be controlled.
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