How Truck Types and Loading Dock Heights Can Affect Your Business

The following information will help you understand truck types and loading dock heights in McDonough, GA to ensure business success.

The loading dock

The loading dock is one of the most crucial components of all kinds of facilities—warehouses, retail shops, grocery stores, etc. With the help of manpower and various equipment, loading docks can speed up cargo loading and unloading tasks in an effort to avoid extra costs due to hitches in progress. The thing facility owners must be aware of is safety on the loading dock. This is where careful planning comes in.

All loading docks should be designed with the proper safety features included, which will improve dock function, worker safety and the manner in which goods are transferred from your facility to its destination. Keep the future in mind when designing your loading dock and avoid common problems like small doorways, excessive slopes, hard-to-use approaches, improper bumper projections and docks that are too low to accommodate any trailers over the standard size.

Truck types

The commercial trucking industry is made up of trucks with a wide range of heights and trailer bed lengths and heights, including semi trucks, container trucks, flatbed trucks, low boy trucks and city trucks. Consider pertinent information about the most common types of trucks when designing your loading dock, remembering that trucks can vary as much as six to 12 inches in height from being empty to fully loaded. Let your dock designer know the types of trucks that frequent your facility’s loading dock, including their heights, widths, lengths, bed heights and how often they come around.

Some facilities see a wide variety of delivery trucks. For these establishments, it might make sense to have several dock heights, or one dock position with a permanent scissor lift or dock leveler. However, if the fleet of trucks coming through are all the same width, length and bed height, then one dock height is a possibility.

Loading dock widths and heights

Once you know the different truck heights using your McDonough, GA loading dock, it’s time to design a dock with the proper width and height. Without the proper height, transferring product from truck to warehouse or warehouse to truck can be difficult, but not necessarily impossible.

The average loading dock height is between 48 and 52 inches; however, some facilities may have specific requirements for their docks that can bump these numbers a little higher or lower. Another thing to note for your designer is the maximum grade capability of your material handling equipment.

Also, you need to know the maximum truck widths and whether the trucks have to back in straight or at an angle so you can either reposition the loading dock door or the dock itself. Another reason that repositioning may be necessary is to prevent accidents and damage to trucks, property and cargo. Plug this information into your loading dock plan and design. It’s important to take all of this into consideration.

Call Affordable Dock & Door today to schedule a loading dock service!

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