Saturday, January 2, 2010

Lightening the Load: Warehouse Workers and Ergonomics.

Engineering controls, process changes, conditioning can reduce injuries, eliminate production delays and reduce health care and workers' compensation costs in the warehouse industry.

Kevin A. Quaid walked into a warehouse and knew he was looking at a disaster waiting to happen. Quaid, a CSP and CPE who's a senior consultant with Aon Risk Consultants in Seattle, watched as employees at the facility pulled boxes weighing 50 pounds off a tractor-trailer and stacked them onto a pallet. Employees continued to stack boxes until they were standing on their "tippy toes" to place them on the pallet, Quaid remembers. Much to his amazement, they continued to stack boxes until the last ones added to the 9-foot stack had to be tossed on the top.

"Space was limited, and that's the message that came down from management," Quaid says, "so employees thought they were doing the right thing by stacking the pallets higher [than was safe] to save space."

Based on Quaid's advice, the company instituted a policy that the maximum pallet height should not go above 6 feet. "That's still high -- not ideal -- but sometimes having boxes between knee height and shoulder height is not feasible when a company has space limitations," he admits.

Back injuries and injuries related to bending and lifting are probably the No.1 safety issue in warehouses, he says, with slips and falls coming in a close second. Claim frequency and the cost of injury claims can be devastating to a warehouse operation. Generally, Quaid points out, "the profit margin of warehouse operations is so little that a couple of costly claims can eliminate any profit. Tons of materials have to be moved to make a profit." One claim can wipe out hours, even weeks, of work. When weighed against human and financial devastation musculoskeletal injuries can cause, engineering controls, process change and proper training seem a small price to pay, he says.

The Human Factor
Kent Wilson, director of ergonomics for Ergodyne, St. Paul, Minn., notes that manual handling jobs place shoulders, backs, knees, wrists, necks and ankles at risk. They also contribute to worker fatigue, which can cause an employee to stumble, shift a load or lose a load he or she is carrying. It can also lead to slips, trips and falls, Wilson says.

Research from a study conducted for OSHA several years ago found that 65% of all injured warehouse workers were manually lifting, carrying or handling materials at the time of their injuries.

At Ace Hardware's Yakima, Wash., retail support center, 250 workers lift, shift and shuffle some 62,000 products. "Our antenna goes up very quickly [over ergonomic issues] because we're a distribution center," says Telara McCullough, human resource manager at the facility. "Some 40% to 45% of our injuries are musculoskeletal."

Engineering Controls Pay Off.
Ergonomics has been part of the safety process at Aurora Packing since 1985. Management at the company, a food processor headquartered in North Aurora, Ill., with a large warehouse operation, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on engineering controls. The investment has reaped rewards for the company, says Michael J. Fagel, Ph.D., CEM,corporate director of safety and security.

At Aurora Packing, management installed conveyor belts to make moving products from one location to another easier and installed lift tables at a number of work stations so employees do not have to lift up boxes or bend down to place them on the ground again. The company has also installed hydraulic lifts and mechanical pulleys, like those found in some automotive plants, and has revamped production lines to eliminate some of the bending and lifting. "Re-engineering never stops" at Aurora Packing, Fagel says, and probably will not as long as the company keeps seeing results. The lost workday rate at Aurora Packing is approximately one-third of the average for its industry.

While engineering controls are effective at eliminating employee exposure to risk, process changes can go a long way in eliminating or reducing injuries.

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