Tag: Business Tips

Reduce Effects of Chronic Pain with Ergonomic Material Handling Solutions

A 2011 article from BusinessInsurance.com stated, “Chronic pain is a infrequent but growing aspect of workers compensation claims…” and advised companies to try to prevent injured employees from developing chronic pain. It added that companies are seeing more reports of chronic pain because of an aging workforce.

Chronic pain can have a number of sources and the article notes that it is hard to define. Still, we would advise companies to do what they can to prevent the kinds of on-the-job injuries that lead to chronic pain. (There is little you can do about illness or injuries workers suffer outside of work.) However, you can provide equipment that is ergonomically sound and functions in concert with the musculoskeletal system. That way, the machines being used at your facility will not be the cause repeated injury among your workforce.

DJ Products makes ergonomic material handling equipment that eliminate the strain of pulling heavy products, parts carts or wheeled equipment. With our powered carts, pullers and pushers, your employees can move everything from soiled linen carts to carpets to cars. Our walk-behind units use battery power to move heavy loads efficiently so the operator is able to maintain control without feeling a lot of strain.

Purchasing material handling solutions from us won’t strain your budget either. But if you are hesitant, think about the costs of workers compensation claims and the strain on your workforce that occurs when even one employee needs to be way from work for an extended period of time.

You can contact one of our Sales Engineers at 800-686-2651 to learn more about which of our products would be best suited to your industry.

Introducing the Chain Drive Cart Caddy

How many of your employees does it take to move 50,000 pounds worth of product? If you’re using the Chain Drive CartCaddy from DJ Products, the answer is only one. This heavy-duty tug is one of the most powerful in our line of battery-powered material handling solutions.

Thanks to the 2,000 pounds of horizontal push and pull force generated by its 6 hp motor, this tug lets you do away with fork lifts and other traditional movers. Do your loads require a lot of turning and maneuvering through tight aisles? Addition of the Power Mover attachment allows for a full 90 degree turning radius.

Like all our products, the Chain Drive CartCaddy is designed with employee safety in mind. Features such as the variable speed twist grip help to prevent repetitive stress injuries that are all too common in material handling. There is also a safety stop switch on the back of the tug in case of emergencies.

Our Chain Drive CartCaddy is powered by three 12-volt batteries with enough life to usually last through two shifts. It smoothly accelerates up to 2 mph in both forward and reverse, preventing frustration due to lag time waiting for the mover to catch up with the operator.

Regardless of the size of your company or warehouse, we have a full range of material handling solutions to fit any applications. Let our friendly Sales Engineers assist you in finding the correct answer for your needs. Call 800.686.2651 or use our convenient online chat feature and become a member of Team CartCaddy today.

Introducing New Hospitality Applications for Motorized Carts

Business owners must constantly be preparing for coming changes and watching for new trends and products. That’s the reason this blog devotes space to those issues, as we have in the past week. As the country’s leading manufacturer of ergonomically-designed motorized material handling carts, we’ve learned that staying competitive in U.S. industry requires not only the flexibility and willingness to embrace new ideas, but the innovative thinking to see new applications for your products in the workplace. Innovative applications of DJ Products’ ergonomic carts originally developed for health care and manufacturing markets have opened new opportunities in the hospitality industry. When you visit our website, you’ll find a new product category for Motorized Carts for Hospitality, Hotel, and Industrial Environments. 

DJ Products has found that many of the same tasks performed in hospital and industrial settings are also performed by employees at hotels, motels, resorts and casinos. All must push heavy carts filled with dirty linens or cleaning supplies. All sometimes need to move heavy equipment, whether it’s an EKG machine or a one-armed bandit. All need to move materials and supplies from one point to another, usually through narrow and crowded hallways. And all have to haul trash. With the click of your mouse, it’s now easy to find and examine all of these commonly used material handling products in one place by clicking on the new link to Motorized Carts for Hospitality, Hotel, and Industrial Environments from DJ Products home page.

Our expanded listing of motorized powered carts and equipment for the hospitality and hospital industries includes: housekeeping carts, dirty linen carts, wire carts for clean linens, powered and electric flatbed carts, a motorized dump hopper for trash and debris, and more heavy-duty motorized industrial carts and powered movers for handling bigger, heavier, more unwieldy loads. We even offer a motorized cart retro kit that can be adapted and installed on any cart, turning your old carts into money-saving models of ergonomic efficiency.

All of DJ Products’ material handling products are built to maneuver economically and safely in confined spaces. The ergonomic, walk-behind design of all of our products provides clear sight lines, ensures easy maneuverability and protects the health and safety of operators. Forward-thinking business owners who recognize coming trends are already embracing ergonomics as the wave of the future. To find out more about DJ Products’ ergonomically-designed powered carts and movers, visit our website and talk to one of our ergonomic engineers. At DJ Products, the future is now!

How You Stand and Sit is the Basis for Ergonomics

Your skeleton is like the steel framework of a building. It is the core structure to which everything else attaches that provides the basic support system for the muscles, ligaments and tendons that allow your body to move.

You may not realize it, but the alignment of the bones in your skeleton when you stand or sit has a huge impact on muscle comfort, which in turn has a significant impact on job efficiency and productivity. Your body posture while working — how you stand and sit on the job — makes a telling difference in how you feel at the end of the workday and is the basis for the science of ergonomics.

How Posture Affects Work

Being forced to stand or sit in an uncomfortable position while working can stress and tire your muscles. Being forced to overextend or place undue pressure on muscles while lifting, reaching, pulling or pushing as you perform work tasks can likewise stretch and strain muscles.

As discomfort increases and turns to pain, productivity decreases as you compensate to relive the strain on your aching muscles. Without relief, pain can become chronic and lead to temporary or even permanent disability.

Ergonomics Improves Performance

Workers come in all shapes and sizes. Rather than forcing workers to contort their bodies to fit fixed equipment configurations, ergonomically-designed equipment allows equipment to be adjusted to provide optimal working conditions for each individual worker. The result is increased satisfaction and comfort for workers and improved worker efficiency and productivity for employers. It’s a win-win solution!

Visit our website or talk to our sales engineers to find the right ergonomic material handling solutions for your business.

What Can We Learn from Failure?

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you strong.” Or “No pain; no gain.” Ask anyone who’s been in business a while and they’ll tell you, you learn from your failures. Those who struggle with a new idea, testing and tweaking it through multiple incarnations until they get it right enjoy a sense of accomplishment unknown to those who simply luck into an idea, though not to imply that there’s no joy in the occasional “gift.” Sometimes, but not often, we get it right the first time. Usually, though, success is a matter of hard work and sacrifice. Perhaps that’s what makes success taste so sweet.

Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big by Ralph Heath (Career Press, 2009, paperback, 191 pages, $9.26 on Amazon.com) is a smart book and a quick read. Heath’s message is to stop punishing mistakes, yours and your employees’, and start learning from them. Emphasize the learning, not the error, and move on. By embracing our failures we strip them of power. As he points out, the people who make mistakes are the same people who succeed.

Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney (Broadway, 2009, hardcover, 217 pages, $15.64 on Amazon.com) explores why some ideas succeed and others fail. Maney contends the magic formula is a combination of targeting your market correctly and staying true to your goal. Many businesses fail because they don’t make the mutually exclusive choice between convenience (low cost + easy use) and fidelity (premium quality + exclusivity). As he notes, a low-end Mercedes won’t sell, nor would a 5-course McDonalds meal.

The bottom line is deciding what need you want to meet and staying true to your game plan. You can’t be all things to all people. Success often comes fastest when you narrow your goal to meet a specific need. That’s been our experience at DJ Products. Our ergonomically designed carts and tugs won’t do everything, but they do a superior job of getting things from point A to point B without straining taxing your workers. Find out more at DJ Products.com.

Corporate Videos Get Their Own YouTube Site

Billed as YouTube for business, eCorpTV.com seems tailor-made for videophiles like DJ Products’ marketing department! As we’re sure you’ve noticed when you visit our website, we’re great fans of video. At DJ Products, we’ve found that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a video is the next best thing to putting our product in the customer’s hand. Just as realtors have discovered that video tours draw home buyers, DJ Products has discovered that showing customers what our ergonomic powered carts can do is a highly effective way to sell our product.

That’s the idea behind eCorpTV.com. Businesses from Fortune 500s to small start ups can quickly and easily post their product videos on the site free of charge. As the site developers note, more than 68% of American workers aged 25 to 44 will watch online videos this year. Adding online video marketing to your advertising mix just makes sense. Online videos have the potential to attract not only customers, but investors, journalists and potential employees. Corporations don’t have to worry about competing with stupid pet tricks or humorous rants, eCorpTV.com accepts only G-rated legitimate business videos. They aim to become a quality service for the business community.

We think they’re on the right track. Watch one of the DJ Product ergonomic material handling product videos. We’ve found that no amount of text can show quite as effectively as a video exactly how tight a turn our CartCaddy power tug can make or just how our side-steer powered cart can be maneuvered. If you haven’t added video to your product website yet, it’s time to take a page from the future and start filming!

Invest in Ergonomic Power Movers to Avoid Employee Injury

If you are wondering if it is worth your while to invest in ergonomic equipment like powered movers and warehouse tugs, keep in mind the costs associated with work injuries that are related to overexertion.

According to Risk&Insurance.com, employees who work in construction, transportation and warehousing may need a month or more to recover from injury. You probably need all your staff working at full capacity to complete projects, so having someone out can slow productivity. There are things like illness that you can’t prevent, but you can give your staff ergonomic equipment to help avoid preventable injuries that can result in lost work time and lower morale.

The article from Risk&Insurance.com discussed how,

“The median number of days away from work to recover from occupational injuries/illnesses was eight for the third consecutive year, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] reported. Transportation and warehousing had the highest incidence rate of all industry sectors, although it was basically unchanged from the previous year…sprains, strains, and tears accounted for 40 percent of the total cases, of which 43 resulted from overexertion.

The back was the body part injured most, at more than one-third”

DJ Products manufactures movers, trailers and tugs that can eliminate the pain and strain of manually pulling and pushing heavy carts or wheeled equipment. Our products are less costly, smaller and more maneuverable that traditional powered equipment. So if you have tried other power movers and found that you were less than satisfied, we think you will be pleased with the functionality of our products.

Please take the time to find a specific electric cart pusher on our website, or call our Sales Engineers for a recommendation on your proper solution. Our Sales Engineer will also be happy to explore custom applications where our base products match primary criteria.

Staying Competitive as Recession Wanes

The economy is finally showing signs of life; although as we mentioned in our last post, recovery is likely to be a slow process. As America recovers from the recession, businesses may find themselves trapped between wary consumers on one side and skittish bankers on the other, further slowing economic recovery. A continued lag in spending and lending means that belt-tightening will remain the norm for at least the next six to 12 months if businesses are to stay competitive and, in some cases, survive.  

In an informal poll conducted last month, Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers said they planned to rely on a variety of cost-cutting measures over the next year to maintain their competitiveness (click the link above for complete survey results):

  • 36% expand territory
  • 32% seek cost reductions from existing vendors
  • 24% eliminate underperforming products/services
  • 24% employee layoffs
  • 21% reduce salaries or work days
  • 12.5% seek work closer to home

Turning to your own workers for suggestions on how to increase cost-saving measures has proved a successful tactic in many industries during the recession. While concessions made by auto workers and airline employees have garnered the lion’s share of the headlines, workers in nearly every industry and business field have agreed to cut salaries, decrease work hours or forego benefits in order to maintain the solvency of their employer and keep their jobs.

It’s all about sharing the load and allowing workers to buy into the decision-making process. Workers express greater support for solutions they have helped create. And they’re more likely to embrace cost-cutting measures — and exert peer pressure on fellow employees to toe the line — when they feel:

  1. Their efforts will have a direct impact on solving the problem.
  2. More people will be able to keep their jobs because of the sacrifices they are making.
  3. The burden is being shared equally by workers and management.  

That last point may be the most critical. We’ll look at why next time.

Workman’s Compensation Claim Trends

Workman’s compensation claims are one of the biggest factors affecting a company’s management of their labor force and costs. Major changes to the national business and healthcare landscapes are expected to have a significant impact on this issue during the upcoming years.

Here’s a roundup of some of the more newsworthy trends taking shape.

  • According to the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI), the number of lost-times claims has been on a downward trend for the last 15 years. However, analysts are predicting an end to this movement with claims beginning to rise in both number and frequency as the nation continues to climb out of the recession of the 2000s.
  • While the full effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) won’t be completely known for several years, some believe that it will help reduce workman’s compensation costs. The removal of lifetime limits and pre-existing condition restrictions will result in less shifting of claims from individual healthcare insurance coverage.
  • Another factor with unpredictable effects is the return of military veterans from the Middle East. All soldiers are scheduled to be out of combat zones by 2016, which will create an influx of new employees in the workforce. It remains to be seen how the workman’s compensation system will be impacted when employers need to accommodate employees with existing physical and mental injuries.

Use of our motorized tugs and pushers from DJ Products can help reduce the number of claims in your workplace. Their ease of use and ergonomic design allows one person to safely transport loads up to 50,000 pounds. Call 800.686.2651 and let one of our friendly Sales Engineers help you find the perfect solution.

Business Survival Strategies that Work

This week we’ve been talking about what it will take to survive in today’s challenging economy. We’ve shared marketing ideas from industry experts and our own playbook that have allowed companies to not only survive past economic downturns but thrive in highly competitive markets. The secret to survival in a bear economy is to develop a corporate attitude that is innovative enough to envision new applications for your products, flexible enough to act quickly when a new opportunity presents itself, and customer-oriented enough to anticipate customer needs and respond quickly to customer requests. Our ability to succeed in these areas has made DJ Products a nationwide leader in the innovative design and manufacture of ergonomic motorized carts and powered cart movers.

Through the example of our own company’s experiences, we’d like to demonstrate how businesses can apply the principles of innovation, flexibility and customer service to survive today and position themselves to thrive tomorrow.

Innovation. Innovators in the material handling field, DJ Products realized the value of ergonomic design before it became a popular cause. We realized that ergonomics was likely to become increasingly important as a worker health and safety issue with the power to drastically reduce health care, insurance, disability and workers’ compensation costs. But beyond that, we saw in ergonomics the potential to improve the speed and efficiency of production across a broad range of business environments.

Flexibility. DJ Products has exhibited the flexibility to imagine and develop new markets for products originally designed primarily for industrial settings. The most compact, light-weight versions of our CartCaddy movers are employed daily in health care and hospitality settings. Their small size and easy maneuverability in tight spaces makes them perfect for crowded hospital corridors and hotel hallways. We’ve found applications for our motorized car/truck pushers in the boating industries and recently designed a specialized version for use by auto racing pit crews.

Customer Service. We’re Old School in our belief that customer service must always be our first priority. We pride ourselves on our ability to customize our products to meet specific customer needs. We’re so convinced you’ll like our products, we offer a free trial program before you buy.

Take a page from the DJ Products’ handbook. Companies that emphasize innovation, flexibility and customer service will survive and can even thrive in these challenging economic times.