New interior doors ensure safety, high productivity
Courtaulds switches to powered, roll-up doors that sustain the company's safety record and cut maintenance costs.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 3/1/1998
When a piece of equipment declines in performance and undermines productivity, plant management can always retrofit it with new components to make it run faster, smoother, more efficient. But when that same equipment poses a threat to employee safety, the decision is simple: replace it.Maintenance manager Samuel Williams of Courtaulds Performance Films, Fieldale, Va., faced this set of circumstances. Courtaulds manufactures resin-coated and laminated window films. Williams was challenged to preserve optimum productivity and a spotless safety record, despite the threat of injuries presented from the older interior power doors.
"Courtaulds has an award-winning safety program that we are very proud of," says Williams. "If we can find safe and productive equipment that removes or greatly diminishes the risk to our employees, you can bet we're going to use it."
On any given day, at least two doors experienced operating difficulties. Despite continuous production and maintenance troubles created by the older doors, the issue of compromised safety emerged as the overriding factor for Williams to find a better door solution.
Incidents occurred when employees, rushing to pass under a descending door, were struck by the rigid bottom of the older doors. Injuries were minor, and Courtaulds' sterling record of 2,100,000 man-hours without an accident since 1990 remained intact. However, the message to Williams and Courtaulds' management to find a safer solution was strong and clear.
This thinking drove Williams to conduct intensive research into the latest interior doors available. His search settled on a roll-up model featuring a soft-bottom edge design.
Williams installed a door for a 30-day trial basis, and the results were immediate. The soft-bottom edge allows the door to form a firm seal along the floor. This feature is instrumental in keeping Courtaulds' "clean rooms" clean. (Courtaulds' production area contains merely 10,000 air contaminant particles per cubic foot versus 3 million per cubic foot in normal air space.)
More importantly, the door helps prevent injury to personnel or products thanks to its ability to safely settle over obstacles. The door has been known to close on something as fragile as a light bulb and not break it.
As added safety, the door features a self-contained wireless transmitter requiring no outside power. In the event the door is hit, the transmitter immediately stops the door without the use of coil cords or wiring in the side frame.
In contrast to Courtaulds' old, poor-sealing doors, the new doors rely on a centrifugal top seal attached to a curtain that creates a positive closure when the door is fully closed. Unlike a brush seal, this system does not interfere with normal operation, and does not scratch the door's large vision panel. Courtaulds forklift operators rely on clear panels for safety and smooth traffic flow.
Best of all, Courtaulds' forklift drivers don't have to wait for the assistance of a maintenance technician to get an impacted door up and running. The new door reattaches quickly and easily after separation with a simple, manual tensioning belt.
"In the past, hitting one of our doors meant an hour or more of downtime," says Williams. "Now, the doors escape undamaged, and our people put them back into place in 30 seconds and go about their business."
The role of interior doors to the facility cannot be overstated. Forty-seven doors seal Courtaulds' production departments from outside areas. "We take cleanliness very seriously," says Williams. "A speck of dust trapped under film mounted to a window looks like a rock to us."
Of special interest to Williams and his maintenance staff is the door's magnetic tensioning system, allowing the door to release upon impact from any direction. This helps prevent punctures or extensive damage to the door from forklifts.
To date, there are more than 20 new soft-bottom doors in operation at Courtaulds. Williams reports the doors have logged more than 35,000 cycles over the past year, all without significant maintenance.
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