Six men or one pusher?
October 1st 2009 Your staff are far too precious a resource to
waste lugging product from A-B, says Tractive
Power's Brendan Ratcliffe. Especially when
you can solve manual handling and efficiency
issues in one fell swoop...
When Ormandy first approached Tractive Power it
presented a materials handling problem, which up
until then, the firm could only address by throwing
people at it. But why waste your most precious resource – skilled
staff – when there are cost effective solutions that save time,
effort and money?
Ormandy designs and manufactures a range of package
plantrooms. All equipment is designed and assembled in its
Halifax factory.
The plant rooms are a modular construction giving a turnkey
solution for on site installations and the key to Ormandy's
success is absolute quality with maximum efficiency. Given that
ethos, the firm recognised that the current manual handling of
its plant rooms in production through the work cells was an
issue, in that multiple personnel had to be used to move the
plant rooms on to the next build stage. This was both a drain on
valuable manufacturing resources and also, a less than ideal
manual handling issue.
With health and safety a key part of the company agenda, it
was soon highlighted to be a major aspect within the operation
that needed to be addressed. Ormandy's Paul Jackson contacted
Tractive Power to provide a machine to turn the movement of
the plant rooms in to a one man operation.
"We knew we wanted to automate our process better, but
weren't sure of the available products out there," says Jackson.
"After extensive research we found Tractive Power and decided to
contact the company as the product looked ideal. After
explaining our requirement, Tractive Power came to site and gave
a demonstration of its Tractive Pusher.We needed a product that
was compact and able to connect to our product from all four
sides to enable us to maneuver the plant rooms easily around the
manufacturing facility."
Tractive Power provided a TP250 Tractive Pusher to move the
6 tonne pods – and it proved to be a huge success, as Jackson
confirms:
"Before we bought the TP250 we had to use up to six men to
manually move the pods safely, now we just have one operator
and the Tractive Pusher. It has improved the Health and Safety
aspect of our operation and at the same time streamlined the
production process. The pusher is used daily and to date has
never let us down."
Tractive Power also provides a full service package with
preventative maintenance for additional piece of mind.
Since its introduction, Ormandy production manager, Paul
Mitchell, says the Pusher has become vital to the entire operation.
"Now that we have the Tractive Power unit we simply cannot do
without it. The Tractive Pusher has become an integral part of our
manufacturing process, and has enabled us to manufacture our
products more efficiently with increased safety."
The gains realised by the Tractive Pusher just go to show
that when push comes to shove, efficiency and best practice go
hand in hand with improved profitability.Which are, of
course, highly tractive
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