Tag: Material Handling

What to Look for in Ergonomic Design

You can’t squash a square peg into a round hole. In effect, that’s the idea behind ergonomic design. Instead of trying to contort human bodies to work tasks, ergonomic design seeks to fit products, tasks and environments to the people who use them. The result is increased productivity, decreased expense and greater worker safety. Definitely a win-win scenario for business and workers.

Ergonomics factors the human element into work tasks by taking into consideration physical capabilities such as force, posture and repetition. The psychological aspects of a task may also be considered, including mental loading and decision making. Ergonomic design may call upon the expertise of engineers, safety professionals, industrial hygienists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurse practitioners, chiropractors, physicians and the workers themselves.

In creating ergonomically designed equipment, both typical tasks and work sites are evaluated. By identifying potential risk factors and conditions, equipment can be engineered to reduce those risks. Ergonomic design must account not only for a range of work site conditions, but also for an even broader range of potential workers. After all, workers come in all body types. Height, weight, physical condition, physical and mental ability, age and sex must all be considered in designing ergonomic equipment. Ergonomic design generally allows equipment to be adjusted to allow for individual differences. 

DJ Products manufactures quality ergonomically designed electric and motorized carts. On our website, you’ll find a handy Ergonomic Load Calculator you can use to estimate the amount of horizontal force necessary to move loads in your particular business environment. The experienced staff at DJ Products can assist you in selecting ergonomically designed equipment that meets the needs of your business. Contact a DJ Products ergonomic design specialist today.

Specialized Carts Designed for Hospital Use

Any nurse, therapist, aide or worker will tell you that working in hospitals, nursing homes and similar settings is back-breaking work. Workers are on their feet all day long and constantly on the move. There’s a lot of bending, stretching, reaching, pushing and pulling involved — all activities that can strain and stress muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints and lead to potentially debilitating musculoskeletal injuries.

Most hospital workers, who typically work 12-hour shifts, will tell you that workloads are already heavy. No one appreciates the extra burden imposed when a fellow worker calls in sick with a strained back. Musculoskeletal injuries aren’t a quick 24-hour fix. They entail days to weeks and sometimes even months of treatment and physical therapy. Returning workers must often be assigned to light duty jobs or face re-injury if they attempt their former activities. The lost man-hours, reassignment and rescheduling needs can create significant problems, both for administrators and fellow workers. The high costs of medical treatment, insurance and workers’ compensation make the elimination of musculoskeletal injury risk a high priority for hospitals, nursing homes and similar facilities.

The heavy pedestrian traffic, narrow corridors and constrained spaces typical of hospital settings present a unique challenge in designing ergonomic equipment to take the physical burden off medical workers. That’s why so many tasks in these settings are still performed manually, despite the risk of injury. To answer the unique needs of hospital settings, DJ Products has created a specially designed line of motorized cart pushers. We have produced a line of small, extremely maneuverable caddies that are designed to carry lighter loads. The quick and easy maneuverability of these carts makes them ideal for use in confined spaces and in areas with high pedestrian traffic.

  • The CartCaddyLite is the smallest, most maneuverable tug available on the market today. This battery-powered electric tug can push or pull up to 1,000 pounds and is versatile enough to handle a variety of cart types, including dollies, hand trucks, laundry carts, hospital carts, maintenance carts and hospital beds. Click here for CartCaddyLite specifications and a video demonstration of this versatile cart puller/pusher.
  • The CartCaddyShorty has enough power to handle carts and equipment that weigh 3,000 to 20,000 pounds. This battery-powered electric tug is a powerful workhorse that can transport heavy equipment, food carts, laundry bins, x-ray machines, respiratory equipment, dialysis equipment, oxygen canisters, wheelchairs, IV poles, even bags of garbage. Click here for CartCaddyShorty specifications.

For more information on these and other DJ Products’ carts, tugs and caddies designed for the hospital industry, visit the DJ Products website.

5 Eco-Friendly Tips to Help Your Facility Go Green

“Going green” isn’t simply a trendy buzzword. Eco-awareness should be an integral part of everyone’s lifestyle. Your carbon footprint, no matter how great or small, is part of the overall environment that affects the health of our planet and its population.

Due to their significant consumption of resources, warehouses and manufacturing facilities present numerous opportunities for conservation. Here are five tips you can implement that pay major dividends in energy and material savings.

  1. Reuse items like boxes and packing material wherever possible. These types of items have long been considered disposable, but they’re usually good for several uses before they become worn out.
  2. If it can’t be reused, recycle it. Make it easy for your employees by providing several well-labeled stations with generously sized containers. Don’t forget about offices, lunchrooms and break rooms as well.
  3. Reevaluate your lighting system. Wherever possible, replace older light bulbs with newer LED models. You may even want to consider installing skylights to take advantage of natural lighting.
  4. Check the condition of your facility’s doors. Poor insulation may be causing your heating and cooling system to work harder. Remote-controlled and motion-sensor doors are available that limit the amount of heat that escapes when they’re opened.
  5. Switch from propane or diesel forklifts to battery-powered equipment tugs. Not only do they conserve energy, they’re safer and more efficient to use.

Whatever your material handling needs are, you can find an eco-friendly solution from DJ Products. Please contact us at 800.686.2651 for more information on our CartCaddy5WP and other models from our full line of equipment tugs. 

Shopping Cart Retriever Allows Retailers to Focus on Customers

During the holidays, they’re particularly noticeable. The bundled up teens sloshing through the slush in search of errant shopping carts left stranded by harried holiday shoppers. They struggle to push them into long, snaking lines and over ruts of ice and snow, muscling them from side to side as they push them toward the store where shoppers wait impatiently to grab one and hit the aisles.

Shopping cart retrieval is a perennial problem for retailers across the country, but especially during the busy holiday shopping season. Each moment you keep your customers waiting for a cart adds to their frustration, not exactly the feeling of good will you’re trying to promote during the make-or-break holidays. You want your customers pushing their cart through the aisles of your store, filling it will all kinds of holiday goodies.

And the more staff you have to task to collecting shopping carts, the fewer staff available to wait on anxious customers and ring up their purchases. During your busiest hours when you need your full staff complement working on the floor, sending two or three (and in bad weather, often four or six) employees out to retrieve needed shopping carts can put an unfortunate dent in your ability to serve your customers quickly and effectively. With the poor economy forcing most businesses to cut back on staff, delegating employees to shopping cart retrieval puts an even bigger burden on your staff and taxes the patience of your customers.

DJ Products’ powered shopping cart retriever takes the strain out of gathering shopping carts and delivering them back to the store. A single employee can quickly and easily maneuver up to 50 shopping carts around a parking lot and in the door without assistance, even through parking lots rutted with frozen snow and ice. The ergonomic design of our shopping cart retriever system eliminates the pushing and straining that often causes muscle injury and back strain when employees are forced to maneuver a line of carts manually. Your employees will thank you for making an onerous job easy. Your customers will thank you for keeping maximum staff on the floor to make their shopping experience more pleasant. And your accountant will commend you for finding a cost-effective way to improve efficiency and productivity. It’s a win-win-win scenario. Visit the  DJ Products website to find out more about our shopping cart retrieval system.

Recognizing Opportunity in the Marketplace

The economic slow down has certainly presented its challenges, but it’s also presented business owners with a unique opportunity to reassess both their products and the marketplace. Savvy business owners are making good use of down time necessitated by decreased sales and lowered production to shift more resources into market analysis and research and development. It’s a move geared to discover new opportunities in the marketplace and position businesses to compete more strongly as the market recovers.

While it’s stripped to its bare bones, this is an excellent time to focus on the most essential aspects that drive the market in which you compete. And that’s a smart thing to do periodically, but a chore that is easily put off in the hustle and bustle of meeting customer demands and production schedules when the market is thriving and you’re focused on sales. While the economy is slow, you have time to focus on the essential needs of your customers and that can sharpen your insight into the primary forces that ultimately drive your business. The process provides opportunities to discover new and innovative ways to meet those needs.

In every industry there are core needs that drive business. Applying new technology to address those core needs allows you to offer customers a competitive advantage they can’t get from your competitors. A down market allows you the time to research and develop new technologies and applications that will allow your business to stand out from the competition and offer your customers a way to compete more effectively in their own markets. This is also a time to explore new applications for your products that can open new, untapped markets for your products. The creation of multiple revenue streams through diversification minimizes your business risk when the economy tightens up.

DJ Products’ own story provides an excellent example of how analysis of core market needs can lead to the innovative application of technology to create unique new products. Early on DJ Products saw a need for the development of ergonomically-designed material handling equipment. You have only to look at U.S. Bureau of Labor and Workman’s Compensation statistics to recognize the high cost in both production losses and worker medical expenses caused by musculoskeletal injuries from moving equipment and products in the workplace. Applying ergonomic design techniques to material handling equipment provided a unique solution that successfully resolved these issues, providing practical and affordable solutions to a core industry need. DJ Products’ continued dedication to developing unique solutions to meet customers’ needs has made us an innovative leader in the material handling industry.

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!

CartCaddy Tug Solves Auto Manufacturing Problem

The task was to design a robotic work cell to fabricate car doors. It was a difficult problem. The jig assembly that would hold the doors weighed nearly 5,000 pounds. The entire assembly would have to be pushed into the robotic work cell. The tier 1 robotics integrator for a major auto manufacturer turned to DJ Products for the solution.

DJ Products’ CartCaddy5WP tug was the answer. This powerful battery-powered tug allows a single operator to smoothly and safely change-out a finished car door with ease. State-of-the-art ergonomic design eliminates any potential injury to workers from manually pushing door assemblies into position. The tug’s powerful 36-volt motor provides effortless maneuvering of loads from 2,500 pounds up to 30,000 pounds. Highly maneuverable in tight spaces, this exceptional tug is equally effective in open spaces, hallways, aisles and assembly lines.

The CartCaddy5WP tug is a more powerful upgrade of our CartCaddy5W tugger. By adding weight over the drive tires, greater traction is created allowing the 5WP tug to manage heavy loads and equipment up to 30,000 pounds. This tug has the power to push or pull almost any heavy cart or piece of equipment.

In common application, the CartCaddy 5WP is used with carts or equipment having two swivel casters in front and two straight casters in the rear. Attaching the 5WP power tug to the swivel caster end of the cart/equipment allows the tug to easily power carts/equipment through turns and maneuvers, even in tight spaces. An ergonomically designed variable speed twist grip prevents carpal tunnel syndrome and allows the operator to maintain smooth control through intricate maneuvers in both forward and reverse at speeds of from 0 to 3 mph. For full specifications on the 5WP power tug, click here.

The electric lift option on the 5WP power tug raises and lowers the tug’s arm for firm attachment to the bottom of carts or equipment. With the arm attached, the tug can pivot a full 180 degrees under the arm, allowing loads to be turned 90 degrees without problem. The CartCaddy5WP power tug is among the most powerful, most maneuverable and most versatile tugs on the market. Click here for more information about the CartCaddy5WP power tug and a video of this tug in action.

Frugality Is New Business Reality

The nation’s economic gurus may have declared the recession over, but they’re warning businesses and consumers alike that recovery could continue for years. And we shouldn’t expect things to get back to the way they were — ever! The country is going through a major reset. After decades of inflated prices, inflated egos and inflated dreams, we’ve had to face the cold, harsh realities of life and — we hope — the experience has left us wiser and a little more wary of falling into the same pit again. The smaller employee pools, tighter resource management and lean production practices developed out of necessity during the recession are here to stay. Frugality is the new reality.

The frugal measures taken to keep American businesses from sinking will help us swim leaner, faster and farther in the post-recession marketplace. Having found that we can function and compete in a frugal environment, businesses are expected to use that new-found frugality to give themselves a competitive edge, using less to produce more. Sure it means that everyone will continue to work harder and do more; but that’s what it’s going to take to compete successfully in the new, tougher post-recession marketplace.

Smart business owners will seek out equipment that allows them to make more productive use of their more limited post-recession workforce. Material handling products like DJ Products ergonomically-designed CartCaddys allow a single worker to perform lifting and transporting tasks that it takes two or more workers to do manually. Because ergonomic design enables multiple workers of any size, shape or physical ability to perform the same task without risk of injury, DJ Products carts, tugs and movers allow employers to maximize use of their workforce. Eco-friendly, battery-operated motorized carts decrease fuel costs while cutting downtime and maintenance costs. And adoption of ergonomic equipment significantly reduces medical and workers compensation costs while letting your workers know you value their health and safety.

Material Handling Solutions of the Future Available Today

Our last two posts (April 18 & 21) have talked about a vision of the future in which a smaller number of highly-trained and skilled, self-directed workers fuse automation and manual operations to accomplish material handling functions with maximum efficiency. While some aspects of this utopian vision will require years of careful planning and development, part of this dream is already within the grasp of business owners.

Smart carts are already available today that can significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a single worker.  Highly maneuverable electric, motorized and batter-powered carts allow a worker to effortlessly transport and manipulate equipment and goods, even in confined spaces.  Ergonomic design ensures the workers can accomplish tasks with an economy of motion, minimum physical force and maximum safety. “Walk-behind” construction allows maximum operator control, even in tight, difficult spaces. Electric cart movers provide operating flexibility that allows more versatile use than standard material handling equipment such as forklifts.

CartCaddy material handling carts, tugs and pushers come in a variety of shapes, sizes and configurations geared to handle any wheeled material handling application, including:

  • Electric cart pullers are designed to pull carts with two swivel casters. The 5th-wheel style of these carts allows them to turn with the load. Loads of 3,000 up to 50,000 pounds can be handled with ease.
  • Electric tuggers that can accommodate 4-swivel casters or wagon wheel type turning enable the operator to also control the back end of the cart.
  • Specialized electric pushers can push carts in a straight line, down a rail or down an assembly line. Among the applications available are car pushers designed to push cars, buses and heavy equipment down an assembly line and paper roll pushers developed to push rolls, materials or large wheels that move in a straight line or roll on their own surface. Trailer movers can move wheeled equipment such as trailers, boats and RVs, anything with a ball coupler or pintle-hitch tongue.

Ergonomics Increase Workplace Efficiency

Manufacturers are shutting factories and slashing jobs in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging from the global economic recession. A recession “always hits manufacturing first and hardest,” said Hank Cox, spokesman for the 10,000 member National Association of Manufacturers. “We’re going into a valley” that looks like it’s going to be “long and deep.”

Economic experts compare this recession to the 2000-2003 slowdown during which manufacturing lost 3 million jobs and never really got them back. Greater initial job loss is expected this time around, but there is hope that as the economy improves a greater number of jobs will be reinstated and that the net job loss will be less than in 2003. Until things turn around, though, everyone will have to work a little harder to pick up the slack.

Increasing the efficiency of your workforce can help business owners trim operating costs. Implementing personnel programs to decrease absenteeism has shown good results but doesn’t address the root cause of the problem. Poor working conditions that place unnatural strain on workers’ bodies take both a physical and mental toll on your workforce. Implementing an ergonomic program in your workplace can not only boost employee morale but eliminate costly musculoskeletal injuries and their associated costs.

Ergonomically-designed powered carts and movers relieve workers of the physical strain and discomfort caused by manual performance of pushing, pulling and lifting tasks. Making an investment in your employees’ health and safety improves morale. And where morale is high, worker efficiency has been proven to increase. But these are the indirect benefits of implementing an ergonomics program in your workplace. Direct benefits include an immediate and permanent decrease in expensive musculoskeletal injuries — particularly back injuries — and the high medical, insurance, disability and workers’ compensation costs they entail.

Workplace injury and illness cost U.S. businesses $171 billion a year. Approximately 13.2 million workers every year are injured in the workplace, resulting in $60 billion in workers’ compensation claims annually. According to OSHA estimates, back injuries account for 1 in 5 disabling injuries. Back injuries alone cost American businesses more than $12 million in lost workdays and $1 billion in compensation costs each year. The lost workday cost of a single back injury is estimated at $26,000.

Implementing an ergonomic program in your workplace can dramatically and immediately impact worker efficiency and your bottom line. Most businesses recoup their investment in ergonomic equipment within the first year. For more information on how ergonomic carts and movers can improve efficiency in your workplace, contact the knowledgeable experts at DJ Products today.