Leading Australian spring balance manufacturer Doric Products was honoured recently at the Endeavour Awards with the Safety Solution of the Year title. Doric has been producing spring balance systems to suit both aluminium and timber windows for over 20 years. The award recognises an innovation introduced into the manufacturing process of the spring balance system, which has helped improve WHS during production and simplify assembly and operation onsite.
Designed and manufactured completely in-house, Doric’s spring balance is the most popular OEM balance system in the country with over 500,000 units manufactured every year. Part of the manufacturing process involved Doric’s assembly workers manually pulling on the spring within the product to clip on the retainer.
This was an extremely repetitive and awkward movement with the workers pulling on springs designed to support windows weighing up to 25kg. With each worker pulling over 500 springs every day, there were frequent incidents of sore fingers, arms and shoulders as well as risk of repetitive strain injuries.
To address this issue, a project was created at Doric to develop a new product that would not only improve WHS and productivity during the manufacturing process but also provide easy operation and assembly onsite for customers.
The project was driven by the team in the spring balance section, with the development taking place over a period of 18 months and incorporating suggestions and ideas from everyone including engineers, designers, toolmakers, supervisors, and the health and safety team.
The final outcome, the Spring’tainer was then entered for the Endeavour Awards, the annual manufacturing awards event held in Sydney this year in May. The Spring’tainer’ became a finalist for the ‘Safety Solution of the Year’ award, with the Doric team going home with the honours on awards night.
Image: The Doric team with the ‘Safety Solution of the Year’ award
