Day: September 14, 2015

Custom Solutions from Friendly Sales Staff

You’ve heard all the advantages and decided it’s time to invest in equipment tugs for your facility. It’s a move that will pay major dividends of increased efficiency and safety. Now the question becomes which product to choose. Fortunately, it’s not one you have to answer by yourself. Our friendly Sales Engineers at DJ Products are on hand to help you find the right solution.

Our base products include standard features that satisfy the needs of most applications. All tugs are battery-powered “walk-behind” units that are energy-efficient and user-friendly. They’re smaller than most traditional equipment, making them easier to maneuver, but they’re strong enough to easily move loads of thousands of pounds.

In addition, all products are ergonomically designed to optimize operator safety. For instance, the electric variable speed twist grip helps to prevent carpal tunnel injuries while allowing for smooth control of the unit. Work-related absences will likely become reduced thanks to these features.

While our standard products are capable of serving a wide variety of applications, your facility may have some specialized needs. All of our tugs can be customized with the addition of options such as 5th wheel arms, foam-filled tires and built-in battery chargers. We’re happy to work with you to provide answers to any of your requirements.

Visit our website for a full listing of all products along with their individual features and specifications. Once you’ve reviewed the choices, contact our Sales Engineers at 800.686.2651 to discuss the best solution for your company or get further information about customized options.

Material Handling Industry “Gives Back”

The material handling industry is often focused on ways to make the job easier for its members. Thanks to their generosity, they also lighten the load for those who have a greater need. Here’s a look at some of the recent contributions our industry has made to charities and other deserving recipients.

  • Toyota Material Handling U.S.A. Inc. named the winners of its appropriately titled “Lift a Co-Worker, Lift a Community” contest. People nominated co-workers involved in volunteer work by posting a photo and description on the company’s Facebook page. The five winners were Arbor Day Foundation, Amvets National, Feeding America, Best Friends Animal Society and Direct Relief. Each group received either a pallet truck or cash donation.
  • First Advantage launched an initiative to assist future generations with the establishment of “Kids Around the Corner”. This program enables First Advantage to donate a portion of their profits to local children’s charities based on the requests of their clients.
  • BlueGrace Logistics gave a boost to some four-legged friends in need with its annual “Cats vs. Dogs” pet food drive. In conjunction with AAA Cooper, FedEx Freight and ReedTMS Logistics they raised 44,000 pounds of pet food for the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, FL.
  • Bastian Solutions and its employees made a gracious donation of their time to Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis, MO. Participants performed valuable tasks such as disinfecting toys and cleaning surgical towels.

DJ Products is proud to be a part of an industry that shows compassion and care for others. Please call us at 800.686.2651 for help with your material handling solutions.

Highlighting the Car Pusher

Cars are relatively simple machines to operate. They’re not so simple to deal with when you have to maneuver them around busy car lots or crowded mechanic shops. Our CarCaddy electric car pusher lets you move these several ton vehicles around with ease.

Whether you’re in the business of selling cars or repairing them, you can’t afford external damage to the vehicles on your lot. The front push end of the CarCaddy has soft, durable padding to protect the car from dents and scratches. Its battery-powered engine provides enough power for one person to push up to 20,000 pounds on flat ground and 10,000 pounds on a 3 percent incline. If your needs surpass that, you can upgrade to a heavy duty motor that accommodates up to 50,000 pounds.

Working with these heavy vehicles can make your employees susceptible to injury. The CarCaddy is ergonomically designed with features such as a variable speed handlebar twist grip to help prevent repetitive stress injuries. We’ve also included neutral throttle braking, soft tread tires for better traction and a high-tech speed controller to make safety the number one consideration.

Use of the CarCaddy isn’t limited to automobiles. It’s ideal for moving trucks, trailers, buses or any vehicle that has pneumatic tires and its own steering function.

Our friendly Sales Engineers at DJ Products are available to help you with obtaining a CarCaddy or any of our material handling solutions to fit your application. Please call 800.686.2651 or try our convenient online chat function.

Improve Your Warehouse’s Efficiency with These Tips

Small changes in warehouse management can quickly add up to a major boost in productivity. Here are some crucial tips to improve warehouse efficiency day in and day out:

Update your Management Software

Nobody should be relying on pen and paper or decade-old inventory software. Even very small businesses can find affordable options for advanced software with features that streamline the efficiency of both the warehouse and your management tasks.

Count—and Recount—Everything

Someone should count and double-check every item and box, in both incoming and outgoing orders. Ideally, two employees should check each order. The moment of time costs very little compared to the labor and resources that go into correcting a mistake later.

Organize & Clean All Areas, Including Your Office

With a repeatable system for staying clean and organized, you will lose fewer items, misplace fewer order slips, and enjoy a healthier and more positive work environment. Seeing a clean manager’s office helps encourage this among the staff.

Encourage Employees with Experience to Help Others

You can build accountability and efficiency by instructing your experienced staff members to spend some time monitoring and helping their fellow employees. Senior workers can spot inefficiencies and can also report back to you on how your staff and system are really doing.

Use Motorized Carts Instead of Unnecessary Labor

The manual labor of pushing and pulling heavy equipment hurts your efficiency and causes a greater risk of lost time due to injuries. Look into ergonomic motorized carts to boost productivity on every task.

If your warehouse has carts, platform trucks, waste containers and other heavy equipment, check out our cart caddy solutions that will boost your efficiency.

Cart Caddy Minimizes Hospital Worker Injuries

Injury occurs when the physical demands of a task exceed the physiological capabilities of a worker. In a hospital, pushing or pulling a rack of dinner trays, a portable x-ray machine or a patient bed may present minimal risk for a healthy, 25-year-old, 5′ 10″, 160-pound male. However, the same task can cause serious injury in a 50-year-old, 5′ 3″, 135-pound female.

Height, weight, age and general health all affect a worker’s physical ability to accomplish various hospital tasks. Different workers will need to exert different amounts of force to move the same piece of equipment. Injuries are most common when initiating and stopping motion. Those movements require application of the greatest amount of force, compared to the relatively low amount of force required to keep an object in motion.

Injuries are also common when maneuvering equipment around turns, up or down inclines, and into or out of tight spaces, such as elevators and next to hospital beds. No matter what a person’s body type, injury is apt to occur any time body posture is thrown off center, as when maneuvering a piece of equipment around a corner. Over-extension of the muscles in the arms, legs, shoulders, back and neck during maneuvering is another frequent cause of worker injury.

The CartCaddyLite Puller takes the physical strain out of moving hospital carts and other equipment. The smallest, most maneuverable tug on the market, the CartCaddyLite Puller is powerful enough to handle most push or pull applications, including linen carts, hospital carts, maintenance carts and hospital beds. Capable of performing fine maneuvers in tight spaces, the CartCaddyLite Puller allows any worker, no matter their size or age, to move equipment without injury.

Click here to watch a video of DJ Products’ dynamic hospital CartCaddyLite Puller in action. You’ll notice how easily the powered CartCaddy attaches to a bank of carts, allows the worker to pull it out, maneuver and then replace it.

Use NIOSH Equation to Determine Safe Lifting Parameters

Are you familiar with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) lifting equation? The lifting equation provides valuable guidelines for performing and evaluating two-handed manual lifting tasks in the workplace. It defines the recommended weight limit as the weight of a load that can be lifted by a healthy worker repetitively over an extended period of time (such as an 8-hour shift) without risk of developing musculoskeletal trauma injuries such as lower back pain.

Under ideal conditions, the maximum weight that the average healthy worker can safely lift with two hands is 51 pounds. Of course, in the real world, conditions are never ideal, and the physical ability of each individual worker will also limit maximum lifting weights.

NIOSH identifies a number of lifting conditions that must be taken into account in computing the recommended manual weight limit for a particular task, including:

  • Horizontal and vertical location of the load. The optimal horizontal and vertical lifting position is directly in front of the worker, close to the torso, and between the knees and shoulders, with optimal height being hip height. 
  • Distance the load must be moved. Obviously, shorter distances place less strain on workers.
  • Balance of the load. An asymmetrical load places unequal stress on the worker’s body, requiring greater effort to balance the load during transport. The more symmetrically balanced a load, the easier it will be for a worker to carry.
  • Frequency of the lift. The more repetitions required, the greater the cumulative stress placed on the worker’s body. The amount of time between repetitions is also important. The shorter the time between repetitions, the greater the risk of muscle damage.
  • Hand coupling available. Designated handholds assist with lifting, balancing and controlling an object as it is manually transported. When handholds are not provided, additional strain is placed on muscles during lifting and carrying.
  • Length of time over which lifting will occur. In addition to the number of lifts and amount of time between each lift, the total length of time over which lifting must be performed will also affect worker performance. Repetitive lifting through the course of an 8-hour shift will be create greater risk of injury than lifting for two hours alternated with other activities.

It is important to take these conditions into consideration when determining the recommended weight limit for manual lifting tasks in your workplace. However, given the wide range of variations in both worker physical capabilities and workplace conditions can be realized by utilizing powered carts to move equipment and materials previously handled manually. By replacing manual tasks with powered material handling equipment, companies can realize considerable savings in both production efficiency and lift-related worker injuries. Contact the ergonomic experts at DJ Products for more information.

Customers Find Unusual Applications for DJ Products’ Powered Carts

Here at DJ Products, we love to hear about some of the unusual and unique uses our customers have found for our motorized carts and powered movers. Often our customers’ inventiveness matches our own when it comes to finding new uses for our ergonomically-designed, compact and highly maneuverable CartCaddies.

S.B. of Sound Construction, who uses our versatile TrailerCaddy on job sites, found a unique personal use for his motorized vehicle mover during off hours. Boating and fishing are the big sports in his neck of the woods where nearly every driveway sports a boat on a trailer. Tired of the tedious back and forth maneuvering it takes to back a boat trailer into a narrow driveway, S.B. put his TrailerCaddy to use and easily positioned his boat in record time — and still had plenty of space to get the family car into the garage. His neighbors were so impressed, his TrailerCaddy is now in hot demand.

“No more must I watch the neighbors look like geeks trying to back their boats into the driveway — they simply borrow my TrailerCaddy,”  S.B said.

Often, customers come to us with a specific problem that challenges us to find new applications for our motorized equipment movers. We’re always pleased when our solution is a hit, as it was for J.A. of Wausau West High School.  

Lugging heavy, unwieldy, free-standing bleachers from one site to another was a problem for the maintenance crew at Wausau West High School. If you have ever tried to move one of these massive blocks of “portable” temporary bleachers, you know portability played second fiddle to sturdy construction when these units were designed. Unfortunately, the multiple uses to which schools must put their space demand flexible equipment use. Muscling bleachers into position for band concerts, school assemblies and various sporting events can tax the physical resources of even the stoutest maintenance crew. The risk of muscle and back strain and other injuries is high.

J.A. came to us seeking a solution. Our small profile, highly maneuverable, powered tugger, the CartCaddyShorty, proved to be the perfect solution. Capable of handling 3,000 pounds and maneuvering in tight spaces and crowded school corridors, the CartCaddyShorty allows a single worker to move and maneuver into place the school’s bleacher units in record time with no more backaches!

“Planning on spreading the work on this solution to the bleacher problem in other schools,” said a pleased J.A.

If you’ve found an unusual use for our equipment, we’d love to hear from you. And if you have a particular problem, give us a call. We love a challenge!

Anatomy of Push-Pull Tasks: Placing the Body at Risk

Pushing and pulling tasks are daily life occurrences, particularly, in the workplace. Because of the extreme stress these two forces exert on the body and the frequency with which push-pull tasks must be performed, pushing and pulling result in an extraordinarily high number of musculoskeletal injuries each year. These injuries, which cost U.S. businesses tens of billions of dollars annually, are largely preventable when ergonomic practices and ergonomically-designed equipment are introduced into the workplace.

Surprisingly, it’s not the weight of the load that makes push-pull tasks so physically demanding, it’s the horizontal push force needed to initiate and sustain movement that places the greatest strain on the human body. In order to overcome natural inertia, tremendous force must be applied to initiate motion of a cart or piece of heavy equipment. As the operator strains against inertia, he must exert extraordinary force to start the cart or piece of equipment moving. In his exertions, the operator places unusual strain on the muscles and tendons of his legs, back, shoulders, arms and wrists. Pressure decreases as the load begins rolling as less force is needed to keep a moving load in motion. However, every time the operator must stop and restart motion, for example to onload or offload parts at a workstation or turn a corner or maneuver through a tight space, he must again exert the extraordinary force necessary to overcome inertia, risking serious musculoskeletal injury each time.

Of the two methods used to move carts and pieces of heavy equipment, pushing is always preferable to pulling. Pulling places greater strain on the body than pushing. It forces the worker to assume positions that minimize the application of force and increase the risk of injury. There are two ways to pull a load: using one hand and facing the direction of travel or using two hands but walking backward and facing away from the direction of travel. Both are problematic and increase the risk of operator injury. Next time we’ll talk about the specific risks involved in each type of pulling task.

The severe strain placed on the body when pulling and maneuvering heavy loads or heavy equipment is eliminated with the use of DJ Products’ ergonomically-designed, motorized carts, tugs and movers. DJ Products’ motorized carts and movers allow operators to safely and without effort move and maneuver carts and equipment with just one hand. DJ Products’ walk-behind design guarantees maximum operator control and safety with full view of the path ahead. Visit the DJ Products’ website for more information about our full line of ergonomically-designed carts, tug and movers.

Next time: Risk factors in pulling tasks

Risk Factors Linked to Pulling Tasks

Injuries from pushing and, particularly, pulling tasks cost U.S. businesses tens of billions of dollars each year, yet are largely preventable when ergonomic equipment and ergonomic practices are introduced into the workplace. In our last post, we talked about how these two common work tasks place workers at risk for potentially debilitating musculoskeletal injuries. Today, we take a closer look at the risk factors associated with pulling heavy carts and equipment.

One-handed pulling tasks. When facing the direction of travel, pulling must be done one-handed, significantly decreasing the operator’s control of the load. The worker must stretch his arm out behind him and twist his body unnaturally to face the direction of travel. This places undue strain on the back, shoulder, arm and wrist muscles, increasing the chance injury.

Changing direction or maneuvering a wheeled cart while pulling it behind you with one hand is not only awkward and difficult, it focuses pressure on wrist, elbow and shoulder joints and on the tender muscles of the lower back, increasing muscle strain to dangerous levels. There is also danger that the operator may lose control of the load, particularly when on inclined grades. If the cart “overruns” the operator, there is risk of additional injury to the operator or others in the cart’s path.

Two-handed pulling tasks. When using two hands to pull a load, the operator must walk backwards, facing away from the direction of travel. Pulling places significant stress on the arm, shoulder and wrist muscles. While using two hands allows the operator to maintain better control over the cart, particularly when maneuvering around turns or in tight spaces, the inability to see the travel path invites disaster.

Facing away from his direction of travel, the operator remains unaware of obstacles in his path. He cannot prepare for dips or rough spots in the travel path that can affect his balance or the balance of the equipment he is pulling. He remains unaware of traffic sharing the same path, inviting collision.

The risk of stumbling and being overrun by the equipment he is pulling is increased when the operator is facing away from his direction of travel. Constantly looking over his shoulder twists the body, increasing strain on lower back, shoulders, arm, wrist and neck muscles and inviting injury.

Preventing injury from pulling tasks. DJ Products’ ergonomically-designed, motorized carts, tugs and movers take the strain out of pulling tasks. Battery operation allows a single worker to move loads without physical effort. Walk-behind design allows a full view of the path ahead, guaranteeing maximum operator control and safety. For more information about our full line of ergonomically-designed carts, tugs, and movers, visit the DJ Products website.

Material Handling Safety Tips

Avoid Injury[/caption]The nature of material handling work involves a number of situations with the potential to cause injury. Large, heavy carts and other equipment are being transported through aisles that can be narrow and congested. In addition, there are often other employees moving around the same areas who may not be paying as careful attention as you are.

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure. Being sensible and vigilant can keep you and others injury-free.

Here are some tips to promote a safer work environment:

  • Always check your route to make sure it’s clear of potential blockage or other hazards. Help yourself and others by keeping the workplace clutter-free.
     
  • If you’re passing through doorways, make sure there’s enough clearance. Getting your hand or fingers caught can be painful.
     
  • Wear appropriate footwear such as steel-toed boots. This is a requirement at most companies, but if it’s not you should take this precaution yourself. Heavy-duty gloves can also be useful.
     
  • Make sure the load you’re transporting is evenly distributed. If it’s stacked too high you run the risk of objects falling on you or others.
     
  • Use good posture to support your back. Bend at the knees and lift with your legs.
     
  • Ask for assistance with loads that are too difficult to handle on your own. An even better solution is using a battery-powered material handling tug. For example, our CartCaddy5WP enables one person to easily move loads of up to 10,000 pounds.

DJ Products offers a full line of material handling tugs for use in applications from hotels and hospitals to airplane hangers. Contact us for more information about how we can simplify your job.