Leading Asia Pacific Bottling Company
Case Study

Targeting safety training with wearable technology using biofeedback and data insights

General information

Most injuries in warehousing, production and distribution result from manual handling activities. The nature of the work being fast-paced, repetitive and generally manually task related, frequently leads to musculoskeletal problems or accidents.

With approximately 12,000 employees and operating 75 production and warehouse facilities, one of the largest bottlers and distributors of non-alcoholic and alcoholic ready-to-drink beverages in the Asia Pacific region, saw the opportunity to use the Soter technology to boost their safety and pinpoint areas of risk as a proactive approach to decrease potential injuries.

Challenge

The safety, wellbeing and resilience of their people is a top priority. The company adopts a safety-first culture that strives to achieve and maintain a Zero Harm workplace.

Having a large, distributed workforce, they were looking for opportunities to provide manual handling training that was consistent, autonomous and created real behavioural change. The Soter technology provided the results they were after and fit the criteria for their business.

The SoterCoach & Clip&Go Solution

Choosing to use both SoterCoach and Clip&Go solutions in their high-risk areas; manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, engaging both male and female employees as well as first time users and sceptics of wearable tech.

SoterCoach included the use of a downloadable app onto the worker’s personal smartphone. The app provided individual result data along with the option to complete a 10-day manual handling training program. The program was completed on-the-job and consisted of microlearning 3-5 minute daily tutorials.

1. The device was collected from a central hub in the safety area at the start of a shift, scanned out and clipped to the shirt/vest.

2. Throughout the day the sensor provided real-time audible and vibration biofeedback alerting the workers of any hazardous movements they made. The individualized notifications optimize training and health, assisting injury prevention and overuse issues, creating sustainable change through real-time training.

3. At the end of the shift, the device was returned to the hub, rescanned, with the option to view personal data for the shift and collect virtual badges in the gamified environment, all to drive improvement.

Results

Overall Reduction of Hazardous Movements

The Soter device measures and captures the hazardous movements that lead to injury, the leading bottler saw an overall 31% reduction of hazardous movements across all risk groups after using the wearable solutions.

Results by Hazardous Movement Type

Breakdown of hazardous movements by type, hour, ratios, improvements and peaks in risk were all captured. The data-based insights allowed targeting safety training to be implemented.

Autonomous Manual
Handling Training

SoterCoach users completed an in-app 3-5-minute micro-learning manual handling training program over the 10 days and at the end of each daily tutorial, workers were asked to rate the content in the app either positive or negative.

The ‘Positive Content’ rating was 100% with workers saying:

John Reece

Worker

“I believe the device is very informative on the information you can receive about taking care of your body and ways to improve day to day actions while working in a manual handling environment. The program has made me more aware of my body position and am more aware when lifting and twisting to ensure I do it correctly”

Dashboard

The management analytics dashboard is the link between the workers and the organization allowing both parties to actively be involved in finding injury prevention solutions.

The management dashboard provided the company with objective data and gave insight to numerous areas of risk that assisted to tailor ongoing training based on the individuals risk profiles and to better understand workloads and suitability for roles.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking against global peers and within departments across different sites helped to identify where the risks were and has enabled a tailored approach to their in-house coaching to better support their employees manual handling training

Using technology to assist injury prevention with the ability to deploy and scale with minimal invasion provided a solution that not only allowed on-the-job autonomous learning for the workers, reducing down time, but objective insight for management. The large bottler has seen that reducing the number of hazardous movements that can lead to injury can significantly reduce their injury management costs and lost time due to manual handling injuries.