Since 2008, the consulting company ALECTIA has been involved in enhancing the working environment of 21 small dairies. This process, scheduled to end in the summer of 2011, will result in three new tools that will reduce repetitive and harmful lifts at the dairies.

ALECTIA has a proven record of assisting Danish dairies in solving OH&S issues.  In 2008, as part of a 1.5-year project, ALECTIA was chosen to map heavy lifting tasks, seen as one of the major ergonomic challenges of the network ”OH&S at Small Dairies”, which comprises 21 dairies.

The dairy network used the experience collected during the project as well as the mapping of areas as basis for their further work.

Development of tools
As a follow-up to the screening project, the OH&S network set up a steering group headed by the plant managers - Poul Pedersen from Thise Dairy, Ole Brander from Grøndal Dairy, and Jens Beierholm from Nørup Dairy.

The steering group applied to the Prevention Fund for a grant to develop working environment solutions that could be applied at all the dairies. This resulted in a grant of about 2 million DKK, which is now used to develop three technical tools to reduce the physical strains related to:

• Lifting of cheeses to and from shelves
• Lifting in connection with the palletizing of retail-packaged cheeses
• Lifting of sacks, buckets, containers, etc.

Three test dairies have been selected to develop and test the tools.

Effective solution
The preliminary results are very satisfactory: ”The tools work perfectly and have solved the issue of heavy lifts in a very simple and effective manner”, says Dairy Manager Ole Brander from Grøndal Dairy to “Dairy”, the news magazine of the dairy industry.

The working environment project continues until the summer of 2011. The solutions will then be made available to the other dairies of the network, and instruction materials will be prepared.

The project is carried out in a close co-operation between ALECTIA, the users and the suppliers. Right from the start, user involvement has been in focus to make sure that the solutions are as user-friendly as possible.