Holden has won a key award at South Australia’s annual Safe Work SA Awards, demonstrating the company’s commitment to continuously improving work health and safety practices.
The award for “Best Solution to an Identified Work Health and Safety Issue” was awarded to Holden at the presentation held last Friday.
The award recognised Holden for engineering a solution to a manual handling risk in the process of fitting wheels to vehicles in the General Assembly plant.
The process, introduced as part of VE Commodore production in 2006, involved a team member manually lifting a wheel from the delivery system and then holding it in place while tightening wheel studs before repeating it on the rear wheel.
Over time with model upgrades, heavier wheels were introduced which had the potential to cause sprain and strain injuries.
The manual handling risk was identified through team member feedback and resolved by Holden’s manufacturing engineering team; who designed, engineered and installed a mechanical ‘Lift Assist’ system to eliminate any heavy physical lifting by the team member.
Holden’s national safety manager, Wayne O’Brien said the Lift Assist system had been extremely effective in resolving the manual handling risk, with zero manual handling incidents and zero injuries on the job since its introduction.
“Lift Assist is a unique and innovative system - when we identified this problem, there was no ready solution available, so we created our own,” O’Brien said.
“The fact that we were able to design and engineer this mechanism from scratch is testament to our engineers and their skills and capabilities.
“Safety is our overriding priority at Holden and this recognition reflects the entire team’s ongoing commitment to health and safety.”
You can watch the device in action by clicking on the link below:
