ergonomics Archives - DJ Products

It’s Time to Learn About Ergonomics in the Warehouse as an Injury Prevention Protocol

Our battery-powered tugger carts are ergonomically designed to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome and other injuries caused by repetitive motions. How much do you know about ergonomics and the role they play in maintaining a safe warehouse?

Observing ergonomic principles allows workers to be more productive while reducing physical stress. Here’s a look at how you can put ergonomics to work in your warehouse.

What Is Ergonomics?

Ergonomics, sometimes referred to as human engineering, is broadly defined as “the study of the relationship between workers and their environment.” The ultimate goal is to design the workplace for optimum efficiency and less physical wear and tear.

Whenever possible, work motions should be centered around the “golden zone,” which refers to the body’s core between shoulders and knees. Workers should rarely, if ever, have to reach above their shoulders or below their waists.

Types of Ergonomic Injuries

Ergonomic injuries tend to fall under two categories:

– Lifting and handling injuries occur when heavy boxes, pallets and other loads are placed too high or too low.

– Overexertion injuries result from repetitive motions, such as long walks during order-picking.

Ways to Improve Ergonomics

– Slot SKUs appropriately with high-volume items placed close by.

– Install pallet flow racks so a case is ready at the point of pick.

– Use tilted pick trays for items stored higher in the rack.

– Train employees in the proper operation of tugger carts and other equipment.

– Encourage workers to report unsafe conditions or inefficiencies in workflow.

– Prioritize regular housekeeping to eliminate cluttered aisles and other hazards.

Ergonomically Designed Tugger Carts from DJ Products

Electric tugs such as our best-selling CartCaddyShorty reduce the risk of both lifting and handling and overexertion injuries. Visit our website and learn more from our helpful sales engineers.

A Focus on Ergonomics Can Prevent Warehouse Injuries

Warehouse and fulfillment center workers perform a number of physically demanding and repetitive tasks on a daily basis, creating a high risk for musculoskeletal injuries. Our warehouse equipment is ergonomically designed to be safer and less stressful on muscles and joints.

Create a culture of safety awareness in your warehouse by training employees to incorporate these ergonomic principles in their everyday activities.

Placing and Picking Items

– Take a position squarely facing the item’s location to avoid twisting the spine.

– Keep movements between shoulder and knee height as much as possible.

– Don’t stack carts in such a way that the field of vision is obstructed.

Packing Shipments

– Maintain a neutral posture: straight neck and back, shoulders down, elbows at right angles, wrists straight.

– Organize products and packing materials in a way that eliminates excessive stretching, twisting or lifting.

– Minimize intensity of gripping, pinching and other forces required to complete tasks such as taping and filling packages.

– Use carts, roller tables and other conveyances to limit the need to manually carry items.

Receiving and Shipping

– Don’t overload pallets. Balance loads with larger, heavier items on the bottom and smaller, lighter items on the top.

– Use mechanical assistance such as our tugs, movers and pushers to transport heavy or bulky loads, especially ones that usually require two or more workers.

– Follow proper lifting techniques: stand as close as possible with feet shoulder-width apart, bend at the knees instead of the waist, lift from the legs. Reverse these steps when lowering items.

Improve Safety and Reduce Downtime with Warehouse Equipment from DJ Products

Workplace injuries cost time and money, putting a double whammy on productivity. Let our sales engineers recommend the best electric warehouse equipment for your applications. Visit our website to learn more.

What Are the Benefits of a Focus on Ergonomics When It Comes to Trash Moving?

Have you looked at your trash room from your employees’ point of view? What looks like an efficient layout may actually be subjecting workers to undue physical stress, putting them at risk for injuries and reduced productivity.

An ergonomically designed workplace takes into account employees’ capabilities and limitations to ensure maximum performance with minimum strain. Here are some valuable benefits ergonomics can have for your company.

How Ergonomics Improves Your Workplace

Injury insurance claims have an impact on the bottom line that goes beyond the obvious. Roughly 33 percent of workers compensation costs are expended on musculoskeletal injuries, while lost productivity and other indirect costs multiply that by up to 20 times.
In addition to physical injuries, poor ergonomics can cause general fatigue and frustration. While employees might be healthy enough to work, they may be too tired and demoralized to put forth full effort.
Concern for your employees’ health and welfare promotes an overall culture of safety, which in turn improves morale. When employees feel appreciated, they’re more engaged in their work and less likely to leave.

Improve Worker Safety with a Dumpster Pusher from DJ Products

Our customers have discovered that a high number of injuries such as back and shoulder strains and pinched fingers were a result of moving bulky dumpsters up and down inclines and around tight corners. Bringing in temporary replacements unfamiliar with the job only made matters worse.

As one customer put it, using our WasteCaddyLite dumpster pusher is “like having another employee on staff.” Visit our website to learn more about how our ergonomically designed dumpster pusher can improve safety at your workplace.

The Business Case for Investing in Equipment that Prevents Back Injuries

Data from an older article stated that on average, nearly 50 workers are injured during any given minute of the work week. The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) published a 2002 report that workplace safety programs benefit both your company and your employees. Fast-forward to today. This data makes a good business case that using WasteCaddy dumpster movers to prevent back injuries is a wise investment.

Safety by the Numbers

In that article, workplace injuries resulted in $128 billion in losses in 1996, which equated to 25 percent of pre-tax net profits. Even in today’s business environment, indirect costs can inflate direct costs by a factor of 20. Some of these include:

• Hiring, training and paying replacement labor

• Reduced productivity

• Investigation time and implementation of corrective measures

• Absenteeism and low employee morale

• Poor reputation in the community and industry

Many of these costs can continue long after the actual occurrence of the injury.

Raising Safety Awareness

The report cited a survey showing that employers buy into the importance of heightened safety practices regarding business and human costs. The top two reasons given were the cost of workers’ compensation insurance and the “right thing to do.”

There is real-life data to support the cost-effectiveness of safety programs:

• Companies have seen a return of up to $6 for every $1 spent on workplace safety.

• After investing in their safety program, a West Virginia coal mining company saw its workers’ compensation rate drop to $1.28 per $100 in payroll, compared to a competitor’s rate of $13.78.

Reduce Back Injuries with Electric Tugs from DJ Products

Our WasteCaddy dumpster mover enables a single employee to safely and easily handle one of the more labor-intensive tasks in the workplace. Call 800.686.2651 to learn more.

Making Maintenance Easier in Hotels and Apartment Complexes

Working as a porter or on the maintenance crew in a hotel or apartment complex can be an excellent job with good pay that never gets boring. Depending upon the environment that you work in, your duties may include everything from snow removal in the Winter and landscaping in the Summer to plumbing, electrical and general contracting. In this line of work there is never a dull moment, but there can be some very stressful and laborious moments if you don’t have the proper equipment on hand to deal with one particularly messy job – trash removal.

Manual trash container removal, especially in complexes that have a large number of apartments, can be a very difficult process. When a wheeled dumpster gets loaded to the brim or contains some bulky items from tenants who are moving out or redecorating can get exceedingly heavy and potentially dangerous to move manually – this can put porters and maintenance crew members at great risk for injury.

In order to make maintenance crew members safer while performing this less than favorable part of their job as well as more efficient, it helps to have a motorized dumpster mover or waste container puller. The trash container movers from DJ Products allow one employee to quickly safely and effectively pull the trash container from even tight quarters and get it stationed where it needs to be for pick up.

Even a completely empty dumpster is heavy enough to pose a risk if employees are attempting to manually move it on their own. With a dumpster mover or trash container puller from DJ Products you can ensure the safety of your maintenance crew and make this task go from the least desirable on the list to one that everyone will volunteer to perform.

Eliminating the Overexertion of Trash Removal

Full dumpsters and trash containers need to be stationed at the right place and at the right time in order to be picked up. This is critical for apartments, condos and retail establishments that accumulate trash quickly because missing a pick up could potentially create a build up of waste and unsanitary conditions. For this reason, employees are often asked to do whatever it takes to get the waste container to its destination, which could potentially compromise safety and put employees and property at risk.

The process of getting the heavy waste container, which may weigh in at a few thousand pounds or more, to its destination could involve employees having to push or pull the dumpster over several hundred feet over rough or hilly terrain. This can be a very dangerous undertaking for one, two or even three employees regardless of the weather, but the high temperatures of the Summer or the ice and snow of the Winter can greatly increase the chance of overexertion and injury.

The battery powered WasteCaddy from DJ Products lets a single employee safely maneuver a fully loaded trash container over any distance and any type of terrain with no worries at all. The very reliable and ergonomically designed waste container mover makes this job that usually requires multiple employees an easy task for just one employee.

Using properly designed equipment to maneuver heavy dumpsters and recycling bins drastically reduces the chances of injuries, while at the same time increasing productivity by allowing the job to be completed by one employee instead of two or three. The job gets done faster, easier and with less of a chance of injury or property damage and this is an optimal situation for both management and the employees.

Preparation Can Aid in Overcoming Unforeseen Obstacles

There are a number of things, out of your control, that can hamper your ability to get shipments out to your customers in a timely manner. Any time you are bringing in products from a location that isn’t local, you can become the victim of shipping delays that can affect how quickly you are able to fulfill customer orders; and any time you are in need of an out of stock or made to order item, production delays can most certainly affect the prospected arrival date of materials.

Many of your customers may be understanding and not overly critical of you if the delays don’t impact their business too greatly, but others are only concerned with getting their order as quickly as possibly and don’t want to hear excuses of manufacturer delay.

Though your hands might be tied when it comes to manufacturer delays, you can help to offset these undesirable instances by being as prepared and efficient as possible in your own operations. Properly trained and motivated employees who operate in a safe and organized environment with reliable equipment can turn around freight from receipt to shipment much more quickly and much more accurately than employees who work in a cluttered environment with outdated equipment that could be prone to breakdown.

Lifts and carts from DJ Products can handle a heavy workload for a full eight hour shift on a single charge and they are designed with the employee’s safety in mind. All equipment from DJ Products is ergonomically designed to dramatically cut down on work related injuries and these lifts and carts make it easy for a single person to handle loads of material that would have required two people working with a manual cart.

You can’t control what happens outside of your facility, but by being as efficient and prepared as possible you can minimize the potential damaged caused by delays with quick and accurate actions within your facility.

Ergonomics Investment Adds to Healthy Bottom Line

Every dollar invested in an ergonomics program results in a savings of $4. That’s the astounding finding of a recent study on the cost effectiveness of implementing ergonomics programs in U.S. manufacturing and business settings.

In the past, many companies didn’t initiate ergonomic programs until forced to do so in response to workers’ compensation claims. The expense associated with claims coupled with the responsibility to eliminate hazardous work conditions forced companies to implement solutions to address ergonomics issues. But acting after the fact only prolongs the agony, pointed out Mike Kind, writing for the New Hampshire Business Review. “As claims are filed, an organization’s workers’ compensation premium increases immediately upon renewal. It then takes a three-year history of reductions in claims for the rate to drop.”

Proactively implementing an ergonomics program may not eliminate every future workplace injury, but the use of ergonomically-designed equipment and the introduction of ergonomic practices has been shown time and again to significantly reduce workplace injuries and their associated costs. In most cases, the cost of ergonomics equipment is recouped within the first year.

As an example, Kind cited a highly computerized operation in which more than half of the employees reported musculoskeletal disorders during their first year on the job. Implementation of an aggressive ergonomics program, including new equipment, procedures and training, resulted in an overall 50% decrease in worker complaints.

Proactive implementation of ergonomics initiatives impacts your bottom line immediately and positively. “In one client research study, it was determined that for every dollar invested in an ergonomics program, $4 in cost savings were achieved,” Kind said. Reduction of worker injury results in significant savings in direct medical costs, insurance and workers’ compensation premiums. Lost work-hours due to doctors’ appointments, physical therapy sessions, sick days and absenteeism decrease. As employee safety and well-being improve, workplace morale increases, bringing with it a healthy work environment, increased productivity and improved customer service.

Creating a successful ergonomics program hinges on three important elements, Kind said:

Support of top management and inclusion in the corporate culture
Establish goals and measure results
Provide effective education, training and leadership

Next time: Tips for creating a successful ergonomics program

Speed is Crucial, but Not At the Cost of Safety

Your business depends on your employees’ ability to receive and then distribute your product to your customers. The quicker and more accurately this can be done, the better – unless of course it puts those valuable employees at an increased risk of injury.

In order for your warehouse or distribution center to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible, your equipment needs to be just as safe as it is fast or you actually run the risk of slowing the order filling process while you deal with the circumstances surrounding the injury. Losing one of your valued employees to injury can seriously hamper your efforts even if you are a reasonable large company – in a very small environment where each person is critical to operations, that loss of one person can be crippling.

Forklifts, reach trucks and electric jacks all come with a very long list of warnings because material handling can be a very dangerous job if safety guidelines aren’t properly followed. Employees are required to travel reasonably long distances with loads of product that often weigh thousands of pounds – attempting this on a machine that isn’t designed for safety can lead to very serious injuries or even death.

The lifts and carts from DJ Products are designed to be the safest material handling equipment that your employees can use. Built in design features ensure that every employee, regardless of height or size can move and lift material in such a way that any chance of injury is dramatically decreased when compared to manual material handling

It just so happens that the safest material handling equipment available also happens to be among the most efficient. DJ Products equipment is capable of transporting heavy loads quickly, quietly and safely regardless of the distance between the loading dock and the storage rack – and you’ll be able to use your electric cart for a full eight hour shift on a single charge, so there is no need to worry about equipment failure. Remember that the fastest equipment isn’t always the most efficient, and when it comes to fulfilling orders and keeping your business competitive efficiency trumps speed every time.

Recession Leads to Survival of the Fittest

It’s Darwin’s principle of natural selection in action. In a poor economy, only the strong survive. A recession “always hits manufacturing first and hardest,” Hank Cox of the National Association of Manufacturers recently told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. According to the Associated Press, in December, “manufacturing activity sank to its lowest point in 28 years,” with indexes falling farther than expected. Some index components, including new orders, fell to historic lows not seen since the 1948-49 recession. Overall, the manufacturing index, which has been steadily declining over the past six months, reached its lowest reading since June 1980, the tail-end of the last major recession.

Major players from Dow Chemical to Ford Motor Co. to Anheuser Busch are chopping jobs and shutting down factories in an attempt to stop the financial hemorrhaging, but it may not be enough. With the global economy in a tailspin, manufacturers can’t rely on exports to save them from disaster. And when the big guys are flailing, you can bet small businesses are being hammered. From manufacturing to retail and everywhere in between, the economy is taking a toll on American businesses. No sector of the economy is proving to be recession proof. No one reported growth in December and most sectors of the economy reported declines in everything from new orders to production, employment and prices. Weak companies are going to fail. It’s survival of the fittest, but those companies that do survive the recession are predicted to emerge far stronger than before and in an arena with less competition. To make the cut, you’ll need to roll with the punches and be proactive about the changes that are coming.

The floundering economy and growing jobs crisis has given the incoming Obama administration a popular mandate to change America (see our previous two posts). Industry experts tell us to expect increased government oversight and regulation. Public backlash from the highhanded attitude of financial institutions that refused to disclose how they spent bailout money has assured that future government help will come with lots of strings attached. Add to that President-elect Obama’s campaign pledge to American workers to improve workplace safety and his pledge to the public to increase environmental protection, and American businesses should be girding for a new era of more invasive government regulation.

There are always two ways to handle change. You can rail and fight against it, or you can embrace it and use it to position yourself ahead of the competition. Time and again, history proves that those who look to the future and embrace change survive. As competition increases, the companies that are proactive about incorporating new technology, new equipment and new processes into their operations are the ones that will rise above their competition and live to see a better tomorrow.

Next time: How DJ Products can help you be a survivor.