ERGOTRONIX, INC.
SARASOTA, FLORIDA

About Ergotronix Inc. Ergotronix is a small company that solves big problems. Located in a modern facility in Sarasota, Florida, Ergotronix is devoted to inventing and producing unique ergonomic technology designed to lighten the load and ease the burden for factory workers. Ergotronix’s family of shop floor innovations make tough jobs easy, while helping eliminate employee strain, fatigue and injury. Ergotronix’s unique products are suited for the most robust and heavy-duty applications and is found in use at major companies such as Boeing, Sikorsky, General Electric, Honda, Goodrich, Harley-Davidson, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, Gillette and many, many more. Fundamentally, Ergonomics is the science of making the job fit the worker. Historically the work place attitude has been the other way around, requiring the worker to fit into the job situation. The ergonomic philosophy is to search for solutions to workplace problems and to create a safe, comfortable work place that will reduce potentials for bio-mechanical injuries. These injuries occur when employees work in awkward postures for extended periods of time or perform tasks that require repetitive motions. Ailments commonly associated with the workplace include back injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. These types of injuries lead to decreased productivity, poor product quality, lost and restricted workdays, increased medical and workers’ compensation costs, as well as low employee morale and absenteeism. Workplace injuries and illnesses cost the nation an estimated $170 billion each year. They result in approximately 6,500 deaths from injury and more than 60,000 deaths from disease, 13.2 million non-fatal injuries and 862,000 illnesses, according to a study presented in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The costs of occupational injuries and illnesses are staggering compared to other major diseases. The annual cost of AIDS, for example, is estimated at $30 billion, Alzheimer’s disease is at $6.6 billion in direct and indirect cost. The $170 billion costs of occupational injuries and illnesses are of the same magnitude as the costs for cancer or for cardiovascular disease. Since the costs of work-related injuries can be compared to the combined annual profits of the 20 largest companies in America, companies need to focus on making safety and health in their workplace a priority.The economic toll on the overall business economy is further reflected in catapulting workers’ compensation costs. The U.S. Department of Labor says the loss in workers’ compensation claims alone is more than $60 billion annually. According to the National Council on Compensation Insurance, back injuries account for more than 50% of these costs and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that more than 1.75 million workers are affected by work-related back injuries each year. In addition to becoming more common, these injuries are also extremely costly in treatments. Therefore, the use of ergonomic lifting and positioning devices that eliminate awkward work positions, causing injuries from excessive lifting, turning and bending, are effective techniques to reduce expensive workers’ compensation claims. Without creating an efficient workplace for the human operators, the workers’ compensation insurance premiums are likely to continue to rise even faster than those for medical insurance.Recognizing that in addition to the workers’ compensation costs, the estimated time-lost cost per injury in corporate America today is $26,000 per incident. A commitment to provide for a work place design that reduces just one injury, a company will, in most cases, save more than enough to pay for the best ergonomic equipment by itself.Employers who give their commitment to wisely invest in ergonomic equipment that lessens the frequency and severity of workplace injuries will experience a decrease in workers’ compensation costs but also will experience other very profound gains.Studies show that today the average industrial worker is actually productive only 70 to 85 percent of the eight-hour workday. That means that between 1.2 and 2.4 hours a day is spent taking breaks or doing something other than the job. Equipment that hinders, distracts or fatigues a worker often manifest in frequent breaks, trips to the bathroom, chronic absenteeism and poor attitude. By upgrading the workplace to adaptable, easily operated equipment that provides comfort to the worker and that reduces the fatigue level, will allow him or her to stay on the job longer. By producing five minutes more “productive time” per worker per day, a company with 100 workers making an average of $12.00 an hour, will produce a bottom line return of $50,000 annually (not including overhead). Naturally the returns will be even larger if a company has a larger payroll or is able to convert more “down time” to actual “productive time”.Because ergonomics is multifaceted and has far-reaching effects on all phases of business, even simple ergonomic changes in the workplace will have profound effects. Improvements have such a broad impact when aimed at making the work environment more ergonomically friendly. After all, the human being is one of the most expensive devices on earth to be placed in unhealthy work environments.As such, ergonomics may have as much of an impact on the social revolution in manufacturing in this new century as did mechanical manufacturing on the industrial revolution in the past century.By selecting ergonomically designed equipment and making sure it is used correctly, management will be rewarded with lower disability costs, insurance premiums, lower absenteeism, increased productivity, reduction in rejects along with evidence of a greater quality of work life. Although the initial cost of providing equipment specifically designed with ergonomics in mind may be slightly higher than purchasing “standard” equipment, it is clear that the tangible and intangible results associated to paying attention to ergonomics in the workplace, will provide benefits that far outweigh the initial equipment purchase cost. The equipment purchase costs, in reality, are very small and are easily justified from an overall financial “return on investment” viewpoint.