industrial workbenches

Three Ways Proper Industrial Furniture Cuts Your Costs

September 11, 2009

If you’re starting up a small workshop or other new manufacturing venture you may be tempted to use lower-priced, off-the-shelf furniture that has been mass manufactured – the kind intended for garages and hobby workshops. It may look like a bargain, but, unfortunately, the savings can be short-lived. Without a proper design, money can be lost to inefficiency or in some cases, larger losses due to furniture failure causing workplace accidents.

You owe it to yourself to outfit your shop with heavy duty industrial workbenches and other furniture specifically suited to commercial use. Here are three ways you can save money by investing a little more money on industrial-duty furniture up-front:

A Less Accident-Prone Workplace: Not every industrial accident causes horrible injuries – but they all waste time and money. Workers spend time getting first aid and taking time off instead of manufacturing your products. You may spend time cleaning spills, disposing of hazardous material, and temporary closing of space – and it may all be the result of an inexpensive work station that had been value-engineered for an activity that it could never satisfy fully. For instance, placing a couple of fans around a standard table is not an acceptable substitute for a real laminar flow clean air HEPA workstation.

Improved Workflow: Time is money, especially for startups that need to prove they can meet high volume demand in order to be taken seriously. That means you need proper workflow procedures to ensure that every station works at full capacity without slowing down any of the others. Standard furniture rarely satisfies the needs to produce an efficient work flow. Instead of planning your shop around inexpensive furniture, plan for it based on the way you’d actually like it to operate. Purchase the industrial furniture with features to match your specific needs, with room to expand and the ability to adapt. This makes workplace flow much easier to achieve. You will be able to produce more, sell more, and prove that you are ready for high volume challenges.

Reduced Maintenance: It’s simple: Industrial Quality furniture is tough. Standard office furniture or lower-grade substitutes are not. Your operations will place all of your furniture under repeated stress. If your furniture fails, you will need to either stop work or find a replacement for that station. Both options waste time and money. But if you buy RDM Industrial-Quality furniture with the proper material and load-bearing requirements, you will save money over the total cost of ownership. A Quality bench, table or other furniture piece will pay for itself.

Contact RDM and we’ll help you develop specific solutions based on your industry, size and other specific requirements. We will help you to design your workplace to become a safer, more efficient and more profitable operation.

Choose the Right Industrial Workbenches for Your Work Flow

August 11, 2009

Work flow is vitally important to any company’s success, but it’s even more critical in the manufacturing industry, where proper work flow not only improves time efficiency but reduces accidents – and in some industries, serious accidents can jeopardize employee safety. Pinning down, refining and improving your company’s work flow is the first priority for managers, but in too many cases they place the full burden of adaptation on staff or tools and machinery, when the real barrier to inefficiency is inappropriate industrial furniture.

A key industrial workbench can influence every aspect of your work flow. The right one improves flow – the work one hurts it. Let’s examine examples from the four main elements of work flow:

Processes: Proper workstations can make or break the construction of processes. For example, if you don’t have workbenches that are large enough to accommodate a full step you must divide it into sub-steps, increasing overall production time and staffing. If two workers need to be side by side in a particular location, the industrial workbench must fit both the site and workers.

Planning and Scheduling: Your goal is to keep maximum uptime with minimum expenditures. You might require workers to “hot desk” between shifts. Each choice needs to be supported with the proper furniture. If you have hot-desking IT requirements you need room for a workstation computer and its cabling – and ergonomic aids to maintain worker efficiency.

Flow Control: Can you start, stop and modify a moving work flow easily? Without an organized production process the answer is probably “no.” For instance, you may require a flow rack workstation that can act as a hub for the transportation of finish products and components. Without it, you must rely on a process external to the workstation (staff consultation, a database, etc.), increasing the number of steps to both stop and start work.

Transit Visibility: When one workstation evolves into a miscellaneous hub for problem solving this can look like a good solution in the short term, but eventually that space becomes inefficient and swamped with half-finished work. Custom workbenches designed as checkpoints for specific parts of a work flow improve both flow and visibility. Managers need only go to the responsible workstation, either physically or through the station’s computer.

As you can see, it isn’t enough to have the right tools and people. They need a working environment that supports the safest, most efficient operations. That’s what we provide at RDM. Contact us for a quote on industrial workbenches and other furniture that will improve your work flow.

Picking the Right Industrial Workbench Top

March 25, 2009

Your work surface is the most important part of your industrial workbench. If you pick the wrong surface it may stain or wear prematurely. The wrong work surface may even lead to an accident. At RDM Industrial Products, we offer top quality work surfaces for all of our industrial workbenches with a variety of surfacing options. If needed, our sales team can help guide you through the process of selecting the right surface. Below are four quick examples of the workbench surfaces that fit various workplace demands.

Cleanroom: Stainless steel is not always the go-to material for the surface of a cleanroom workbench. The exact requirements are based on particular cleanroom standards. Stainless steel surfaces don’t scratch easily or accumulate foreign matter. They can also be quickly and easily cleaned. Electropolished stainless steel can be very pricey, but is necessary for clean rooms of class 10 or above. For cleanrooms of class 100 or less, there are many other more cost-effective options available, such as our standard plastic laminated top with added phenolic backing sheet. The laminated surface does not particulate, and the underside of the wood substrate is sealed with the phenolic backing sheet.

ESD Static Control: If you are working with static sensitive materials or equipment the top choice is clear: You need a static control table with an ESD protective laminated work surface. These surfaces work in concert with our properly grounded steel table frames, providing a dissipative path that leads harmful static away from your products or equipment. They also help to reduce electrical charge buildup.

Heavy Duty Manufacturing: Stainless steel tables provide a durable work surface for manufacturing, though an additional layer of rough material may be warranted for traction. Keep in mind that in these cases, you will need a table frame that will support your specific load / activity. We also offer solid plate steel tops for heavy-duty applications.

Semi-Service: In this case, the workbench actually serves as front of house furnishing where it’s not only visible to the public, but may even be used by customers. There are a number of “Do it yourself” businesses that need a proper mix of beauty and utility. In this case, the right material is really based on a combination of use and image. Stainless steel is great for kitchens, for instance, while wood (see our wood industrial workbenches) is a great all around material. Also, our plastic laminated tops are available in hundreds of standard colors and patterns.

Whatever your choice for a work surface, we have the industrial table solution you need, or we can manufacture one with the dimensions and materials you specify. Contact RDM to find out how we can make tables / workbenches that are a precise fit for your needs.

Lab Furniture Surfacing: More Than Superficial

January 27, 2009

One of the most common mistakes people make when they’re outfitting a lab for private development and manufacturing is to ignore the type of lab surfaces they need in order to perform safe, productive work. Lab tables and other laboratory or industrial furnishings that look the same side by side can actually have vastly different uses, depending on the type of work surfaces they use. Here at RDM we can manufacture furnishing solutions to meet and exceed your needs; the dimensions and surface materials are separate concerns, but both are important. Your table or bench needs to fit its area — but it also needs to survive actual use, too. Below are some basic guiding principles when it’s time to place your order:

Know the Standard: Always be aware of your local city, state and federal laws, as well as professional advisories for the material you expect to be handling. For example, if you’re handling live specimens you probably should peruse the CDC’s Biosafety Level Criteria. Private companies will not typically work with infectious agents, so in all likelihood you’ll look to Biosafety Level-1 criteria, which specify a water-impervious surface with the ability to handle moderately high temperatures. Other fields will have specific requirements in for heat, chemical reaction and conductivity.

Don’t Skimp on Surface Integrity for the Sake of Price: It’s never worth it to save money by skirting regulations and advisories. Aside from the safety and liability issues the fact is that you won’t really save money. You’ll just make the demand for a replacement come that much sooner. If you purchase a bench that allows water to penetrate any cracks or crevices on the surface coating, you’ll end up with enough rot or corrosion to rapidly render it useless. Besides, lab surface technology has advanced to the point where it’s economical to make choices that exceed the requirements. Trespa’s TopLab Plus is one example of an excellent all-around solid surface material that suits many laboratory and industrial area applications.

When in Doubt, Ask: With over three decades in the industrial furniture business, RDM has plenty of experience outfitting research and manufacturing facilities with lab furniture of all kinds. If you’re not sure how to outfit a space within your budget, talk to us. We’ll draw on what we know to help you find the best possible solution. Contact RDM for your lab furniture solution. We’ll strive to exceed your expectations.

Ergonomic Products Make Your Industrial Workbench or Lab Table More Efficient

January 11, 2009

RDM Industrial Products features a wide range of ergonomic products. In many cases, ergonomics is used as a buzzword to describe any comfortable piece of furniture or equipment, but there’s much more to it than that. Ergonomic adjustments make work environments more efficient and easier to use productively. Here are five ways proper ergonomic products do that for a lab table, industrial workbench or other professional workstation.

Body Alignment

The reason “ergonomic” is used as a synonym for “comfortable” is because of this benefit. If your monitor is in the right position you can see it without straining your neck. You can type with less chance of suffering a repetitive strain injury. This is the most commonly known benefit of ergonomic products.

Cognitive Ease

Less well known is how ergonomic products help you think better. This is because proper equipment allows you to adjust your workspace into a more intuitive configuration. For example, if you need to enter data after inspecting a sample in a lab, the ergonomic solution is to put the monitor at or near the same sight line. This means the worker doesn’t have a gap where the sample is out of sight, where he might forget and have to check again, slowing his progress.

Injury Reduction

As everyone knows, less comfortable workspaces can cause injury due to repetitive strain, but the fact is that poor ergonomics cause injury by promoting inattention or leaving hazards in a worker’s path.

Time Motion Efficiency

Correct ergonomics lets people work faster, by positioning workstation elements in such a way as to reduce the number of motions required to complete a task. Many companies hire professionals to perform time motion studies in their workplace, but any perceptive manager can improve efficiency just by looking at how a workstation forces someone to take certain steps, and then modifying that space to eliminate those steps.

The manifold benefits of ergonomic equipment will multiply your workstation’s output. Contact RDM for product ideas that can do this for you.

RDM Industrial Products’ Custom Industrial and Lab Furnishings

January 6, 2009

One of the advantages of buying from RDM is that as a manufacturer, we are able to make custom orders to fit your industry, workspace and safety requirements. While we offer a tremendous selection of industrial workbenches and lab tables, these can be seen as starting points to help you order a custom product in addition to being standard products themselves. Our industrial furniture gallery is also an excellent way to help you define exactly what you need.

You can help make the ordering process as smooth as possible by following a few simple steps. First of all, make sure you’re familiar with all applicable, state, local and federal regulations that might apply to installing the new furnishings. For many businesses this is as simple as checking the local fire code, but if you work with hazardous materials or perform research your requirements can be much stricter.

Another thing that you can do to ensure an easy ordering process is to accurately measure the space your furniture is going to occupy. This is a simple task that can save time and pain. By avoiding inaccurate, out of date floor plans, you can avoid major estimating and install catastrophies. Please make sure you have reliable, current measurements.

Talk to us to see what we can build for you (the answer is: almost anything). We can recommend materials, offer initial quotes and answer questions about the item’s characteristics and life cycle.

Schedule work around the installation. If you’re moving a wheeled workbench in this may take no time at all, but if it’s time to install permanent counter space or complex lab furnishings you will need to figure out how installation will affect your work. Pay special attention to time sensitive activities such as industrial curing and similar manufacturing processes.

Contact RDM Industrial Products to start the process or ask for more detailed guidelines. We’re ready to provide the perfect custom industrial furniture solution for you.