When you need to move heavy loads, you want equipment that offers the flexibility of a CrossFitter with the power of a power-lifting beast. Lifting heavy loads is no small feat, and understanding which option will work best for your facility, plant, or warehouse will keep your lifts in good form without sacrificing strength.

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You want to move heavy loads safely and effectively while also keeping your solution economical and efficient. Consider the Jib Crane, and effective tool in your warehouse arsenal that will hold its own and can interface with a wide variety of workstations and functions.

Foundationless Jib cranes offer versatility and economic savings, as they are bolted directly to an existing concrete floor and don’t require a concrete foundation. Using the existing floor means that you don’t need to install a costly special foundation, plus you can install and use the system sooner because you don’t need to wait for concrete to cure. Existing floor use also makes sense for smaller capacity and shorter span jib cranes. With that said, there are multiple concrete considerations before you install a foundationless jib crane. The key, is your installation.

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OSHA’s conveyor guidelines focus on guardrails and emergency stops, but when it comes to conveyor safety, the story hardly ends there. One neglected aspect is in areas where people may pass under suspended or overhead conveyors. Here are some best practices for those situations.

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The forklift industry will be in Washington, D.C., this spring to take part in the fifth annual National Forklift Safety Day. This event, scheduled for June 12 in the nation’s capital and across the country, will provide an opportunity for the industry to educate customers, the public, and government officials about the safe use of forklifts and the importance of proper operator training. Taking the time to ensure that your workforce is aware of these forklift operations and procedures is an important way to ensure an environment of pedestrian safety for your facility.

Cisco-Eagle highlights forklift safety as one of our main objectives towards helping customers achieve safety success. To help celebrate National Forklift Safety Day, we’ve lined up some of our previous content so you have an easy portal towards a safer forklift environment:

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The forklift is ubiquitous in warehousing, manufacturing, distribution and other industrial operations, but many companies are actively working to reduce fleet size—or eliminate forklifts entirely.

Why eliminate forklifts?

This seems to be mostly about safety. Powered industrial trucks ranked sixth for OSHA violations in the most recent data. They’re always  near the top. They cause about 100 deaths in the United States every year, and tens of thousands of injuries, with a high percentage termed “serious”. Forklifts are often the single most hazardous machine in any facility that operates them. Can you truly make a warehouse forklift free, as many EHS experts recommend? Maybe not, but you can minimize forklifts and keep them out of the most dangerous areas. Let’s dive into some methods.

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The forklift industry will be in Washington, D.C.,  this spring to take part in  fourth annual National Forklift Safety Day. This event, scheduled for June 13 in the nation’s capital and across the country, will provide an opportunity for the industry to educate customers, the public, and government officials about the safe use of forklifts and the importance of proper operator training. Taking the time to ensure that your workforce is aware of these forklift operations and procedures is an important way to ensure an environment of pedestrian safety for your facility.

Cisco-Eagle highlights forklift safety as one of our main objectives towards helping customers achieve safety success.  To help celebrate National Forklift Safety Day, we’ve lined up some of our previous content so you have an easy portal towards a safer forklift environment:

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Ergonomics should be wired into the design of all the processes of a modern industrial operation. Whether that means designing conveyor workstations with ergonomics in mind, utilizing work benches and stations that are adjustable for “right height” operations, adding turntables to rotate product, finding ways to reduce order pickers’ bending and stretching, or designing storage areas so that bending and stretching are minimized, well-designed operations bake ergonomics into their work processes.

One of the common areas you can attack is hand tool use. In many operations, strong younger workers may not complain about using heavy, hand-held tools for 8+ hours a day, but that stress is taking its tolls.

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The jib, gantry and bridge cranes used in material handling applications are typically smaller, lower capacity, and used with a much wider array of end effectors — magnetic connections, manipulators, bundlers and other specialized end effectors along with the standard hook mounts — than construction cranes, but many of the same safety and application issues are shared by both types of crane systems. Read the rest of this entry »

We published an article in the third quarter of the MHEDA Journal, Automation and Labor: Can’t They Get Along? The point of that article is that for American labor, robots aren’t currently reducing employment so much as changing it. Automated industries tend to be more profitable and less vulnerable to offshoring and other job-reducing factors.

Our friends at AutoQuip brought up another point—that automated systems and lifts can add valuable years to the working lives of high-skill, aging employees.

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Facility space is expensive—very expensive—so it’s become increasingly important to utilize it to its full potential in any industrial facility. We’ve seen many companies find ways to expand their crowded operation utilizing mezzanines and other elevated work platforms that help seize the vertical cube. There are multiple methods for moving materials between vertical levels, and  vertical reciprocating conveyors (VRCs) are one of the best.

With an array of carriage types, drives, designs and power sources available, what vertical lift might meet your needs?

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