Warehouse & Factory Line Marking Guidelines

Here are guidelines for warehouse and factory line marking:

1. Plan Clearly: Develop a comprehensive line marking plan tailored to your facility’s layout and processes to ensure safety and efficiency.
2. Establish a Colour Scheme: While there’s no strict standard, common associations include yellow for aisles and traffic lanes, orange for inspection areas, red for scrap zones, white for fixtures, and yellow/black for hazards.
3. Keep it Simple: Maintain simplicity in your colour scheme to facilitate quick understanding and response from employees in various situations.
4. Consult Professionals: Engage a reputable line marking company like Northern Marking to help develop a coherent plan and colour scheme for maximum safety and efficiency.

In a recent blog post, the Northern Marking team discussed the key benefits of warehouse line marking, ensuring that professionals who work in these industries are well aware of just how vital line marking can be to the day-to-day runnings of such large and complex commercial buildings.

This month, we want to continue with this topic, by offering some clear and simple guidelines on warehouse and factory line marking.

Make a clear line marking plan for your warehouse

As we’ve just mentioned, factories and warehouses are extremely complex buildings with a number of different processes all going on at once.

The aim of warehouse line marking is to help employees make sense of these processes and to ensure that anything deemed dangerous or hazardous is made visually apparent through clear markings.

With this in mind, when it comes to line marking your warehouse or factory, it’s best not to jump straight in.

First, a plan should be made to ensure that your line markings cohere with one another throughout the building. This, in turn, will make your processes as efficient as possible, while ensuring that your employees come to no harm.

Create a line marking colour scheme

While there is no absolute standardised colour scheme when it comes to warehouse and factory line markings, there are some commonly accepted associations that you might want to follow when creating your plan.

• Yellow – you can use yellow lines to mark out aisles, traffic lanes and work cells

• Orange – you can use orange lines to mark out areas that hold products or items for inspection

• Red – you can use red lines to clearly mark areas for scrap and defective products or equipment 

• White – you can use white lines to mark out areas for fixtures or equipment that is otherwise not colour coded

• Yellow & Black – yellow and black striped lines are often used to indicate that an area may expose an employee to hazards or physical danger

• Black & White – black and white striped lines can be used to clearly identify areas that should be kept clear for operational purposes, but don’t actually pose any physical risks to employees

• Photoluminescent – luminescent lining should be used to identify safe exit routes that are used in the event of a lights-out emergency

Keep it simple

While all of the coloured line markings listed above can be used if it would benefit your warehouse or factory, bear in mind that it’s important to keep your colour scheme as simple as possible.

This, of course, is to ensure that it’s as easy as possible for employees to understand and internalise the meaning of each code, so they can quickly use that information to respond to a situation if required.

Consult a professional

Trying to draw up a line marking plan for a warehouse is a difficult job, particularly if you’ve never done it before, which is why we would always recommend calling a reputable company such as Northern Marking.

A line marking company will be able to help you create a marking plan and associated colour scheme for your building which makes sense and flows seamlessly, ensuring maximum safety and efficiency.

Northern Marking is based in Manchester, but provides services to clients in the following areas; Huddersfield, Blackburn, Rochdale, Preston and beyond. Northern Marking is a leading road marking company, providing the following services; line marking, school & playground markings, warehouse markings, electric car parking space marking, line removal, white lining and car park markings.

Northern Marking are an ISO 9001:2008-accredited company, so you can trust us to carry out any line marking job to the highest of standards.

We’ve been carrying out warehouse & factory line marking for over 12 years, so you can trust in our dedicated team to get the job done properly. For more information about the line marking work that we carry out throughout Greater Manchester and beyond, get in touch with our friendly team today.