Warehouse demarcation

What gets marked

A demarcation scheme is usually four separate jobs that happen to share a paint kettle.

• Pedestrian routes. Walkways, crossing points and the doors people arrive through. This is the part that keeps people away from forklifts, and it is the part worth getting right first.
• Vehicle routes. Aisles, one-way systems, turning areas and the approach to loading doors.
• Storage positions. Racking and shelving footprints, block-stack bays, staging and marshalling areas, goods in and goods out. Marking where stock is meant to sit is what stops it drifting into the aisle it was never meant to occupy.
• Keep-clear zones. Fire exits and escape routes, extinguishers and hose reels, electrical panels, isolators, eyewash and first aid points.

Colour is convention, not law

There is no single colour scheme set down in UK law for floor marking, which surprises most people who ask. What the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require is that traffic routes are organised so that pedestrians and vehicles can move safely, and that routes are indicated where that is needed for safety. How you indicate them is left to you.

In practice most warehouses settle on something close to the same scheme: yellow for traffic routes and general segregation, white for storage positions and bay markings, red reserved for fire equipment and hazards. The colour matters far less than the consistency. One scheme, used the same way throughout the building and written down somewhere a new starter can read it, does the job. Three schemes laid down by three contractors over ten years does not.

How it is applied

The method decides how long the marking survives, and survival is the whole point.

• Tape. Quick, cheap, and applied without taking the floor out of use. It lifts at the edges under forklift wheels, particularly where vehicles turn on the spot, so it suits temporary layouts and trial runs more than permanent routes.
• Paint. Two-pack epoxy or MMA laid onto a prepared floor. Far more durable than tape, and the usual answer for permanent walkways and vehicle routes. It needs the floor clean and dry, and it needs the area out of use while it cures.
• Thermoplastic. Heat-applied and thick enough to stand up to heavy traffic. The hardest-wearing option, and the most disruptive to lay.
• Studs and inserts. Used to pick out bay corners and rack ends where a painted line would be worn through by the same wheel passing over it every day.

Mark the layout, not the mess

Demarcation is set out from the layout it is meant to enforce, which means it belongs at the end of an installation rather than as a separate visit months later. Racking positions are agreed on a drawing, the steel goes in on those positions, and the lines follow the same drawing.

Doing it the other way round produces the failure this trade is known for: lines painted around where things happened to be standing on the day, which are wrong the first time a bay moves, and which nobody trusts by the second year. When the layout does change, the old marking has to come up rather than simply being painted over. Two sets of lines on a floor is not a scheme, and staff will follow whichever one suits them.