Taking the strain out of handling
March 1st 2008

Henkel, producer of household brand names such as Pritt, Sellotape and UniBond, has solved a manual handling problem with the aid of Hallmark Materials Handling's straddle de-palletisers

Employing over 50,000 people around in the UK, the company's manufacturing plant at Winsford, Cheshire produces adhesive products including the well known UniBond DIY sealant range. As an organisation, Henkel is proud if its reputation for progression and quality. Kevin Harding is a production team leader at Winsford, and has been with the company for over seventeen years.

"Rather than scrimping or cutting corners the company places a premium on safety and productivity," he explains.

Still largely based on the shop floor, Kevin has a front line view of how things operate, including contributing to regular risk assessments.

Said Kevin: "The company seeks to assess risk as well as add value at every stage of production. Our employees are asked to assess what they do day-to-day: could things be done more safely or efficiently?

Lifting and moving problems Part of the production process at Winsford involves transferring large amounts of sealant from 200kg drums to individual tubes ready for retail.

For the operatives this means lifting and moving drums stacked on pallets in storage areas to the sealant transfer area.

Said Kevin: "One of our regular risk assessments revealed that existing counterbalance drum lifting and moving equipment was potentially hazardous and relatively inefficient.

"The combination of the counter balance weight and the drum meant that the operative had to move over 450kg across the shop floor, while the equipment's inability to grab a drum from the back of a pallet forced operatives to manually drag pallets 180° to provide lifting access."

Continues Kevin: "A knock on effect of this was that our female operatives where unable to complete this task unaided, leading to disrupted work patterns for everyone involved. It was a problem and it needed fixing. The question was how?"

Straddle de-palletisers After researching the problem online Henkel contacted manual handling specialists Hallmark Materials Handling.

"As often happens it was a case of going down and sizing things up," said Hallmark's managing director Roger Grimshaw: "After just a few minutes on the shop floor it was obvious that standard straddle depalletisers would solve the problem.

"As well as lifting the 200kg drums with only 25kg of effort, the straddle depalletisers can pick up drums from the rear of the pallet eliminating the need to drag or move it in any way." Roger continues: "Although manual handling solutions require some investment the improved efficiency gained often return on that investment within a year – Henkel places a premium on maximising productivity and quickly recognised the longer-term benefits of investment.

"From Hallmark's perspective Henkel are an excellent client to work with. They take the time to analyse and recognise potential safety and efficiency deficiencies and ask the question: 'how can we fix this?' then it's our turn." Said Kevin: "Roger seemed certain the de-palletisers would solve the issue so we took one on a trail a basis." 15 months later and Henkel have eight straddle de-palletisers – all from Hallmark.

Adding value – improving safety Said Kevin: "Safety is and must always be our primary concern at Henkel, and the straddle de-palletisers made an immediate and obvious safety improvement.

"The need for operatives to drag or lift heavy half loaded pallets was eradicated thus vastly reducing the potential for back injuries and the inevitable and costly personal injury litigation.

"From Henkel's perspective because dragging pallets around added no value to the production process or our products, it had to be eradicated – and through the straddle depalletisers it has been." Said Roger: "It's easy to forget that the regulations regarding manual handling cover pushing and pulling as well as lifting – the de-palletiser takes the strain out of everything." Any other benefits? "Absolutely," continues Kevin: "Female operatives can now move drums as easily as a man, bringing Henkel in-line with workforce parity regulations.

"Keeping individuals on their jobs simply means less disruption and improved work flow efficiency." Kevin concludes: "We've been delighted with our relationship with Hallmark – they have shown that with thought and creativity there is a solution to most handling problems.

"Most recently we've asked Hallmark to review how we currently manually remove residue from the bottom of our tilting IBCs.

It's a challenging brief but we're confident they'll find a solution."

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