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Picture book links productivity, ergonomics

A “picture book” from Southworth Products Corp. using amusing caricatures is intended to show how the company’s ergonomic material handling equipment can increase productivity and reduce fatigue and injuries at the same time.

Entitled Matt Handling and the Lost Link to Productivity, the colorful, 12-page, comic book-style brochure tells the brief story of a midlevel manager at a generic assembly plant with good employees and the best production machines. The manager concludes that the only way to increase production is to feed the machines faster, but how? Bending, lifting, and reaching are not efficient ways for workers to retrieve and reposition parts, he comes to realize. In addition to wasting time, such activity takes a toll on workers.