The most important part of any warehouse isn’t its storage capacity or even the merchandise within it. Instead, merchandise warehouses need robust and effective security plans to operate well.
Without a solid security protocol, your customers may not trust you to handle their wares.
Investing in security isn’t just an investment in your merchandise, the building, or even in your clients. By building up your security plan, you’re investing in yourself and your future.
Yet, making an effective security plan isn’t easy. Merchandise warehouses will have different security plans to meet their unique needs. Yet, despite their differences, all security plans have the same fundamental and critical parts that work to keep the building, and everything in it, safe.
Keep reading below to learn about the fundamental parts of any security plans, and why they’re important to include in your plan too!
1. No Such Thing As Too Much Communication
Communication is a fundamental part of any business. Effective communicators rise to the top of any field, partly because they understand the importance of working together. By communicating effectively, you help bring different parts of your merchandise warehouse together under the same goals.
One of those goals must be to keep the place secure and safe. When all of your departments work together to identify thieves and potential vulnerabilities, you cover more ground at once. When everyone works together and the warehouse works as a single unit, thieves and anyone else who means you harm will think twice.
To bring your departments together, make sure to have a clear and accessible security plan in place. Everyone should know who to contact if they find a potential security vulnerability. You should also ensure people have the equipment they need to communicate with anyone they need to.
That means equipping employees with radios, as well as supervisors. It means equipping your warehouse with telecom technology and integrating communication technology into your employee’s cell phones. There are thousands of ways to improve your teams’ communication skills – all you need to do is invest in it.
2. Defend The Perimeter
There are good reason so many warehouses employee nightly security guards. It’s because hiring overnight security professionals actually works to deter thieves, and it gives you some other fringe benefits.
By hiring people to stay in your warehouse after everyone else leaves, you’re ensuring thieves never have the opportunity to break in. Guards can help secure your warehouse just by being there – thieves are innately scared of other people lurking around their quarries.
Overnight guards monitor the entire building through a variety of technology too, which will give intruders pause. They will have to contend with security cameras and access points as security guards wander the area. Security guards also have some fringe benefits you can take advantage of.
As they wander through the halls, they may identify potential structural or maintenance issues. The quicker these kinds of issues are reported, the less of an issue they may develop into. Hiring security guards can actually help you avoid larger expenses later.
3. Merchandise Warehouses Need Access Control
Controlling which people can access different parts of your warehouse is a fundamental part of your security. Not everyone should be able to access the security room, where security cameras can be tampered with. And not everyone should be allowed into rooms with sensitive merchandise in it.
When you regulate who has access to different things in your warehouse, you set clear guidelines about people’s roles within it. Stockers should only be allowed into the areas they need to stock. Management should also only be allowed into the areas they oversee, as well as any room where records are kept.
Access control systems also let you monitor where a person can be at any given time. When a person swipes an access card or plugs into a PIN, it’s logged. That way, if something goes missing from a room or there’s damage in it, you can review who accessed the room.
Access control automatically gives you a list of people to talk to if something goes wrong. It can tell you about a person’s daily habits and help you judge if they’re effective at their jobs or not.
4. Bring The Internet of Things Online
Security cameras are a fundamental part of any place’s security plan. They allow you to review the things that happen in any given area, without you ever being there. They automatically create recordings of people in any given area so that you can review and even use it as evidence if you need to.
Yet, security cameras are also outdated security solutions. Recording an area while you’re not there is fundamental to security, but there are better ways to do it.
With the rise of the internet of things, you have options to monitor an area. Doors can be equipped with small cameras along the access panel to ensure people don’t misuse other people’s access cards. With the internet of things, you can even fly a drone around your warehouse and monitor areas on your phone, if you want.
5. Test Out Your Security
The most important of any security plan is the steps you take to make sure it works. You can never fully trust a security plan until you see it in action. Luckily, there are services which test your security to make sure it actually thwarts the people it’s supposed to.
Pentesters can work to verify your cybersecurity works. Meanwhile, those same testers can try to gain physical access to your building. They work by pretending to be actual thieves and work to try and overcome your security.
If they don’t manage to overcome it, then you be assured that the plan you created actually works. Otherwise, you will have identified vulnerabilities before anyone else and will be able to plug it. No matter whether your security succeeds or fails, testing it can only help it improve.
Security Is About More Than Protecting Your Inventory
It’s easy to believe that investing in security is just a way to protect your merchandise warehouses. In reality, security is a fundamental part of securing your future. The more security you have in a warehouse, the more likely it is that potential clients will trust you.
That means more business, and more the more business you get, the farther you will go. The higher you will rise in the industry. So you should invest in only the best security available.
Contact us, and we will work with you to ensure your warehouses are as secure as possible. When it comes to security, investing in any less than the best can ruin you. So don’t take any chances, and use us for your security solutions.