Since warehouses are used by many businesses to store a vast range of physical goods, these can be easy pickings for thieves who happen to get into a warehouse.
This situation explains why, if you run one of these businesses, the onus is on you to keep warehouse security up to scratch. We would particularly urge you to heed the following tips…
Be selective about who you recruit
Given that many security threats to warehouses actually originate from inside them, it can pay for you to be extra careful about who you staff them with in the first place. It goes without saying, then, that you want especially trustworthy employees.
While exactly who would count as ‘trustworthy’ can be very much a subjective judgement, you can at least put job applicants through a strict screening process aimed at weeding out bad apples. These may include, for example, applicants with a criminal record.
Make sure your warehouse has enough large open space
It can be a good idea for you to leave some ‘buffer space’, so to say, in your warehouse. This strategy can help to prevent stock in the warehouse from getting damaged as well as ease employees’ efforts to retrieve these goods.
However, there’s also a good security incentive for you to prevent tall storage facilities in your warehouse from blocking the view: workers in the building will have a good sightline through to parts of the building where wrongdoing could otherwise too easily go unnoticed.
Put up perimeter fencing around the whole site
Of course, it would be harder for aspiring criminals from outside your business to enter the physical warehouse building in the first place if you arranged for security fencing to be erected around the site’s entire perimeter.
You should, however, make sure this fencing is at least seven feet high. Meanwhile, where openings in the fencing are meant to allow authorised vehicles to access the site, you can have security barriers and gates as well as number plate recognition technology fitted.
Add CCTV cameras both inside and outside the warehouse
All of these cameras can be connected to the same network — one that also allows each camera’s video feed to be remotely monitored.
As for exactly where those cameras should be installed, you could prioritise areas where would-be thieves are likelier to linger — like entry and exit points, not to mention areas where high-value inventory is kept.
If any of these cameras do record a crime happening, the footage can help with identifying the culprit and serve as evidence in a court of law.
Invest in secure doors and windows
A warehouse’s weakest spots — at least from a security point of view — are often the building’s doors and windows, for the simple reason that, obviously, they tend to be easier to break through than solid walls.
You could inspect your warehouse’s current windows and doors and find that many of them lack up-to-date security features.
Hence, you might be able to justify the expense of replacing these problematic doors and windows with newer units built to hold up against physical attacks for longer.
Take advantage of our alarm response service
With this service, we can send suitably trained and experienced engineers to your premises to install alarm systems. If any of these are triggered at your warehouse, an alarm response security officer from All Time Security can respond by turning up at the building in little time.
Ideally, though, alarms we install at the warehouse will prevent crimes from even happening there. Indeed, the mere sight of these alarms, especially if attached next to signs with warnings along the lines of ‘this warehouse is alarmed’, can deter people from attempting crime.
Hire security patrol officers
One reason why many dubious people might want to prey on warehouses is that they can too often be left empty or with specific areas that people never or rarely visit.
If your own warehouse is sparse in ways like these, you can help to close these security gaps by hiring security guards. When you source these from security patrol firms, you can arrange for guards to carry out mobile patrols to both daily and nightly schedules.
All Time Security can supply your UK warehouse with patrol officers who have been trained by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) and know how to respond appropriately to security incidents.
Utilise a key holding service
You might have heard or read the term ‘key holding’ before, but remain unsure what it actually means. It refers to a specialist security service where a security firm holds keys to a client’s warehouse and keeps those keys in a secure location at a distance from the warehouse itself.
If the warehouse’s security is breached, the security firm can send a security officer to the site. Once this officer has arrived at the property, they can check it and then decide what to do next.
In the event of a minor security incident, the officer might do little more than lock the warehouse up again. However, if the alarm was triggered due to a more serious security incident, the officer will take appropriate steps to safeguard the premises.
These steps can include contacting emergency glaziers if window glass has been smashed, or asking a static security officer to temporarily stay on the premises.
Familiarise your workers with good security practice
No matter how much technology you introduce to the security equation, you have to remember that, ultimately, you and your employees are still only human. For this reason, no matter how diligent these workers are with their security processes, human errors can still slip into them.
Fortunately, when you brief your employees in depth on security protocols, you can reduce the chances of such mistakes happening. Many companies operating UK-based warehouses could go even further by outsourcing much of their warehouse security to All Time Security. To learn more about how your own company could benefit from going down this route, please phone our head office on 01494 511222.
