Improve Safety and Save Time with Ergonomic Pallet Strapping

Pallet strapping is a common and effective method to secure loads for storage and transit. But while it protects the product, what about your people?

The Hidden Cost of Manual Strapping

Strapping a pallet manually involves constant bending, crouching, and walking around pallets. Over time, this repetitive motion can take a toll on workers’ health, especially their backs. In fact, back pain is one of the leading causes of workplace absenteeism across Europe ^[1].

Warehousing is one of the occupations reporting the highest incidence of work-related back pain^[2], let’s consider how pallet strapping may contribute to this and how it affects the health and wellbeing of our warehouse personnel.

If an operator straps 50 pallets per day, over the course of a year they will have bent down approx. 50,000 times and walked 25,000 circuits of a pallet.  Even with comprehensive training there is huge potential for back pain, fatigue, and repetitive strain injury.

Traditionally operators have come up with their own solutions to make the process easier on their backs and use poles or even broom handles to help thread strapping underneath the pallet.  But these aren’t always effective and can sometimes make the process even more awkward or unsafe.

Introducing ErgoPack: A Smarter, Safer Solution

Thankfully, there is a better solution! NPP are delighted to partner with ErgoPack to offer our customers a mobile strapping system that ticks all the boxes in terms of ergonomics, operational efficiencies and ease of use.

• Ergonomic: The operator can strap a pallet from the touch of button, with no need to crouch or bend to attach the strapping.  No bending means less back pain and a lower risk of injury! The ErgoPack strapping system has been awarded AGR quality certification for improved spinal health and employee safety in the workplace.  See www.agr-ev.de
• Easy: ErgoPack is super easy to use, with intuitive functions and minimal operator training required.
• Efficient: On average it takes an experienced operator two minutes to manually strap a pallet. With ErgoPack this is reduced to just 40 seconds.  A 67% faster operation!  If you are strapping 50 pallets a day, you can save about 24.5 labour hours over the course of a month.

See the Difference

Have a look at ErgoPack in action and see how it compares to more traditional manual strapping processes.

How is Your Company Doing?

Take a moment to consider the number of pallets your operators strap every day.

When we examine this over the course of the year, we get a better understanding of the long-term health risks to our staff, and the potential for injury within our own organisations.

* Calculation example: For manual strapping, the operator must bend down 2 times and walk around the pallet 1 time per strap. So, for a properly strapped pallet with two straps, this means bending down four times and walking around the pallet twice.

With 1 pallet per day with 2 strapping operations and an average of 250 working days, this results in 1000 times bending and 500 times walking around the pallet.

Let’s Talk Ergonomics

At NPP our team are on hand with the best advice and solutions to help your workers overcome these risks.

Get in touch today to arrange an ErgoPack demonstration and see for yourself the economic and ergonomic benefits for your operations: sales@npp.ie or +353 1 880 9299

[1] Bevan S, Quadrello T, McGee R. Reducing temporary work absence through early intervention: the case of MSDs in the EU. The Work Foundation. 2013

[2]Luckhaupt SE, Dahlhamer JM, Gonzales GT, Lu ML, Ward BW. Prevalence, recognition of work-relatedness, and effect on work of low back pain among U.S. workers. Ann Intern Med. 2019;171(4):301-304.