Introduction

Distribution centers form the backbone of logistics, allowing the largest companies to efficiently store and distribute goods at a massive scale across the globe. Activities within these centers involve a substantial amount of material handling tasks such as product mixing, organizing, packing, and dock operations.

A Fortune 500 Company, with one of the largest distribution operations in the world, decided to deploy the TuMeke software at one of its distribution centers to identify risky movements within tasks and more proactively decrease potential injury risk.

Problem

This distribution center has hundreds of workers performing a variety of different manual handling tasks. Safety staff were seeing ergonomic related injuries represent the largest portion of their recorded incidents and wanted to find a more efficient way to assess the risk of such injuries developing and quickly identify what can be changed in advance.

Solution

The TuMeke Ergonomics software solution took half an hour to deploy to all safety staff at the facility and completely overhauled their safety operations.

The TuMeke software builds detailed 3D models of the human body moving through space from standard videos – videos that you record through the TuMeke mobile app or upload on the TuMeke web based Risk Suite. With this information, the TuMeke system completes industry standard assessments to estimate risks with a standard methodology to prioritize interventions to prevent injury. 

After a video is uploaded, the system automatically determines the noteworthy postures in a job, frequency of particular movements, and the duration postures are held. It then offers automatic recommendations on which postures in the job are noteworthy and what parts of the body should be considered for adjustment with estimates of risk reduction impact.

This Fortune 500 company decided to move forward with TuMeke due to the tool’s ease of use and raw speed. The system is designed to be user friendly, and doesn’t require having deep ergonomics expertise prior to using the tool. TuMeke allowed the safety team to significantly increase the coverage of jobs they could assess for injury risk and more quickly implement changes before an adverse event occurs.

Results

The distribution center saw a 68% decrease in recorded Musculoskeletal Disorder injuries within 6 months of deploying TuMeke. Safety staff also shared they felt more empowered and found the software led to more healthy collaborations between safety teams and line workers. This one facility deployment had a year-over-year projected value of $194k.

Based on the results of this initial deployment, the Fortune 500 firm is exploring integrating TuMeke into the safety teams of dozens of other sites.

‍