A Smarter Way to Avoid Repetitive Heavy Lifting

Overview
Georgia Pacific is a major manufacturer and marketer of household paper products (Quilted Northern®, Brawny®, Dixie®), building materials (plywood, lumber, gypsum), and industrial packaging. This top North American producer of tissue, pulp, and containerboard wanted to eliminate the ergonomic challenge that the assembly line workers faced daily -- needing to bend down and access products from floor levels. The company’s management contacted Cherry’s Industrial Equipment for a solution.


The Challenge
The client’s assembly line products are staged five feet high on a pallet. To access products at the lower levels, it has historically been necessary for workers to bend down to retrieve and lift the boxes. As a result, workers were constantly engaging in the repetitive motion of bending over, grabbing and lifting boxes.
 
In addition to addressing this significant ergonomic concern, the manufacturer wanted a way to eliminate the need for pallets in the process, thereby avoiding having a pallet at the location once all the product was removed. The solution being sought was severalfold: reduce the likelihood of workplace injury due to repetitive motion and eliminate the extra step of disposing of pallets when the product was removed.


The Solution
The Cherry’s team views each customer challenge as unique, recognizing that there is no “one size fits all” solution. Drawing upon its four-plus decades of industry experience, and a series of detailed discovery meetings with Georgia Pacific, National Account Manager Jordan Smith, who led the project, determined that a PalletPal would be an integral part of the solution proposed. However, specific modifications would be needed.
 
A PalletPal is a lift table operating on springs and which uses the load weight to set itself in position above the floor. Its springs and shock absorbers lower and raise loads as boxes are added or removed from pallets.
 
This action keeps the product at a more ergonomically friendly height. As loads are removed from the top, the lower loads rise higher, eliminating the need for the operator to constantly bend near the floor.
 
Jordan and the Cherry’s team knew that a standard-design Pallet Pal would not alone meet all the client’s needs, as the PalletPal typically uses pallets. Cherry’s custom-designed a product which would add “standoffs” to the table instead. These individual standoffs create space between the levels of product, allowing a forklift to remove and place product on a table or other location without needing a pallet. Cherry’s further customized the PalletPal by changing its surface from the standard circular table to a square one, to better accommodate the manufacturer’s product and reduce the chance of product falling off the tabletop. The PalletPal offers workers complete 360° access to loads
 
The customized PalletPal also included accordion skirting for the table to hide any potential pinch points for the operators and ensuring their safety.


The Results
The client began with the purchase of a single unit, to test how it would accommodate their needs. After a month of operation, they came back and purchased fourteen (14) additional customized PalletPals for their location.
The customer was so pleased with the results they introduced Cherry’s to another location of theirs that does similar work, and we are following a similar process with this additional site. Cherry’s is scheduled to deliver another customized Pallet Pal to this second location, and if this unit performs well, the customer will order additional machines for all their lines. We are confident that they will be similarly impressed.
 
Takeaways to share with the team
Taking a standard product and being able to customize it to suit the customer’s needs is one of the things we do best at Cherry’s. In this way, the customer receives exactly what they are looking for. Customization like this means that we do not have to “re-invent the wheel” and can deliver a solution at an affordable price. We plan to continue developing this product so that we can offer it to other companies facing similar challenges.


Conclusion
Each client has specific needs, and our ability to deliver a world-class solution begins by discovering exactly what those needs are. In this case, a standard PalletPal would address one of the client’s major concerns – that being improved ergonomic conditions for workers – but there were additional requirements that the standard unit would not address. In this case, customizing the Pallet Pal so that it could function without a pallet was a key consideration, as was changing the shape of the surface where the client’s products rest. By understanding the client’s needs and working collaboratively with the engineering team, Cherry’s designed and delivered a solution that will serve the client in this and other locations.