EP. #4: In-Plant Safety Trends and OSHA

Right from the source features Jeff Johnston, who's a business manager with Arbon Equipment. On today's episode, he discusses in plan. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on industrial or commercial facility. Well, hello, listeners. Thanks for tuning in again to the Right High Podcast. With us today, we have Jeff Johnston from Right High. Jeff, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Ken. Yeah, you bet. So let's give our listeners a little bit of bio on you.

My my job title is business manager at Arbon Equipment and what I do is I manage all of the Allied equipment sales and equipment sales that are further into the facility than normal right height equipment. like the dock equipment and stuff like that. I I go further into the facility. I started in the industry back in 1995 and worked with a company that sold equipment through Wright Height's network and came to Wright Height uh in the mid-2000s and I've been there ever since.

So the first thing we want to talk a little bit about trends in industrial safety and what kinds of things are changing in facilities in terms of what are you seeing in how facilities are are being built and and how operations are functioning in in those facilities today.

I mean in general facilities are being built so much larger than they were in the past. And in new facilities it's a lot easier to create a very safe environment for workers. You can have wider aisles, you can have a bigger shipping zone, a bigger receiving zone. blind corners designed out of a system. Where we see more problems is people who are adding on to their current building and adding space.'Cause now you're trying to make things match up and you end up having a lot of uh

intersecting walls and a lot of uh things that you can't change. And that's where we see a lot of those blind corners that we do have some struggles with. Are you seeing facilities growing upward at all too? And are there any kind of uh solutions and and ch well really first challenges in uh in growing upward? The biggest challenge in growing upward is how are you going to use that space?

And there's things companies can do with putting mezzanines in or built in building multiple levels in their in a facility, but then you deal with the struggle of moving material, equipment, people in between those levels. What we see more happening is automated storage and automated retrieval systems being built higher and higher, where you don't have to have people up there on a normal basis. The other industry where we really see them using the using height is cold storage.

In cold storage, you can go up a heck of a lot cheaper than you can go out and just makes their whole system much more efficient. Are you seeing other facilities growing outward as well? Is that a trend that you're seeing too? It it really seems like that's companies first move is to try to expand outward. Once they get landlocked, then they start looking at going up. Really though, in today's material handling world there's so many options

that can make going up so much easier. There's vertical lifts, there's incline conveyor, there's different kinds of carousel systems that we can put in that would just allow us to really move things throughout a facility easier.

than a lot of customers know is possible. A lot of customers look at their facility and say, I'm using all my space and I walk in there and they've got a seventeen foot high ceiling or an eighteen foot high ceiling and we can put a mezzanine in and we could raise light manufacturing for'em or just clean up their facility a little bit by having some automated systems moving material up to the workers and yes, the workers have to go up the stairs once a day or twice a day, but

But it's a much cleaner system than they would think they could do. What kinds of challenges are created in those situations though? Well, you you have a lot of safety challenges depending upon how you're moving things up and down. The first go to that a lot of people try to do is if it's mezzanines is they try to move stuff up and down with a forklift.

And when you move stuff up and down with a forklift, you know, historically there've been things like sliding gates and pivot gates that you could push a pallet through from the lower level with a forklift and the gates would automatically swing open when you pulled the pallet out. The gates would close. That's really something that's not allowed. OSHA frowns on that because it does create the possibility for an opening that somebody could fall from that's above four feet.

So there's things we have that address that. We have dual action pivoting gates that always provide a a forty two inch high barrier for workers so that they're always safe while they're at those raised elevations when they go to pick that pallet at the upper level and move. So you mentioned OSHA. Can you talk a little bit about some trends maybe in OSHA some extra little emphases that they're having on on certain regulations that facility managers should be paying attention to?

A couple of years ago, OSHA changed their rules on general walkways, protecting walkways, on fall off protection on anything above forty eight inches. And when they created that standard, we saw a lot of companies start taking it very seriously. We had corporate initiatives from a bunch of our major accounts. The interesting thing though with OSHA regulations is Many, many customers go way above and beyond what OSHA requires. We're seeing companies value the employee so much.

that they're doing everything they can and yes, accidents always can still happen. No matter w you can no matter how much time you spend designing something, something can go wrong. So that's really where OSHA comes in is then they then they apply their regulations. In the past, when you'd come up with new types of guarding, it was well it has to stop ten thousand pounds at four miles an hour. In the grocery industry,

If they're having a pallet jack with pallets, they're not near that ten thousand pounds. If they're in the paper industry moving a big parent roll of paper, They're gonna blow that ten thousand number out of the sky. Oh yeah. So really trying to come up with ways to effectively guard the true risk.

and four miles an hour in a big distribution center, those forklifts are going almost double that in many cases. So we really uh really had to take a look at our guarding equipment and figure out how could we provide a a really good solution for all these customers.

How has that changed and how is right height really addressing those concerns on the pallet jack that is not carrying ten thousand pounds and going four miles per hour? Because let's be realistic, that is only a you know once in a ten times situation. So I when I started in college I started in engineering and kinda jealous that I didn't finish it because what our engineers created is they actually created like a railroad track system with a cart and this

rail is at an incline so they can drag this cart back to different levels of incline to get to different speeds and they can load this cart up to over thirty five thousand pounds. So every single product that we make we can load up and test at different speed.

It's actually a a system that we actually had the University of Wisconsin come out and have a professor take a look at our system, analyze it, and help us come up with a way to predict how it's going to react at every different weight capacity. Which is really unique in the industry. Uh what we call it is we call it our blast rating. And it it really helps us focus on what a customer's true needs are and put the right thing in place.

You know, you walk through facilities and every facility always said, Well, we have safety zones. We've got these yellow lines painted on the floor. And those yellow lines Keep in mind I'm walking through the facility with the guy right now looking at the yellow line that we're not inside. So those yellow lines really didn't do what they needed to do. Right. And kind of what we do is we walk in there and we say, Well, we want to raise that yellow line.

If we raise that yellow line to a forty two inch height, we're gonna make people more aware of what's happening around them. And that yellow line was at best maybe a visual barrier, but not really visual because it was on the ground. It was dusty. It was dirty. We take that, we raise it to that 42 inches. They're yellow, they're bright.

Now we have a visual barrier that's way more effective and then depending on the risk in areas, that's when we decide whether we use something that can actually fully stop a fork truck. And you know, like I said when I started it was just this metal guardrail. I think we have nine different configurations that we can provide for customers right now to guard a pedestrian walkway.

And, you know, for a long time people said, well, I can't guard this area because I need access once in a while. And I think that's one of the most creative products that we have is a product that can actually drop all the way down into the floor. You have full access as you would need it. And then you can pop this thing back up and it will stop thirty thousand pounds on a dime.

Now how does that work with the process of uh kind of developing some of these products? Because it's very, you know, ingenious. We like to try to come up with some stuff on our own and we absolutely do. But we also listen to the customers. And when a customer says, What I'd really like is something that can do this We reach out to our engineering teams and they'll typically contact that customer and say, tell me more about what you need.

And then they'll send an email and say, Babe, anyone else encountering this? Anyone else seeing this? We've also had stuff where customers just like that retractable system, the paper industry really needed that for rail dock. And they drove the whole development of that product for us. And now we can't believe how many uses we're finding for.

Another way that I feel like sometimes products will come along is there are changes in regulations such as OSHA. Is there anything going on with them right now with OSHA, any kind of regulation that's changing that facility managers should be aware of? We we talked earlier about going up. And when you go up, you typically have Mezzanine.

A lot of people go racking, particularly the e-commerce world. In the e-commerce world they have a lot of pick and flow racking and a lot of those rack those racking scenarios have open ends on those on the racking. Now when you have a pallet set up there and it jams in that system. Now you have workers going out, getting near that opening at the end. And I was recently in a facility that was 48 feet high. Their top level rack was at 32 feet.

and they had workers walking out there at the end of thirty two feet. I was in there because they just had a new head of safety who walked in and saw somebody doing and he's like, We're not using that top row anymore until you come up with something safe. They weren't happy with any of the systems that existed and we're we're actually working trying to come up with something for them on that.

Uh with the advanced technology that's out there, things like automated guided vehicles and those ASRS systems that are becoming increasingly automated, they're also kind of working amongst employees. How does that sort of interaction work?

Anytime you have that human machine interface, there can be a risk. And we do a lot of stuff with our machine guarding products in there, which are for our machine guarding products it's actually a barrier door. And typically what people uh have been doing in the past is they use sensors or light curtains and they have a buffer zone between where someone would trip that and where the machine is. What our equipment allows us to do is get rid of that buffer zone.

So we're putting the person closer to the work. We're speeding up the process'cause they don't have to back away and then, you know, walk walk back a couple steps, let the s the system do its thing, and then take a couple more steps back in. We can actually put the person right there, close the door in front of them, allow them to do their work, open the door when they need their interaction.

You get into some of the large metal fab places where some of these openings are ten feet across and at the safety zone is typically right around three and a half to four feet. So you're saving people 40 square feet, give or take, at every cell. That ends up adding up. Well Jeff, I think that's a pretty good wrap here on covering OSHA and different safety trends and challenges that are going on in the industry. Is there anything that we might have missed that you want to touch on?

Well you talked about changes in facility and separation and it kinda just came to mind there was a Food Safety Act a couple of years ago that really changed how a lot of people did business. and we're still seeing smaller companies and some larger companies still trying to catch up and meet those regulations and we have a curtain wall product, our zone works product that is getting implemented

Like crazy at these facilities to create these separated environments. Not related to any of our OSHA stuff, but that just completely came to mind when you asked. No, that's great. Is that uh something to do with the FDA uh FISMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act? Yes, exactly. Exactly. Hey Jeff, we appreciate all your expertise and appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you very much.

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