industrial furniture

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.

Gallery Spotlight: Economy Industrial Furniture

May 12, 2009

This month, we’ll look at some of RDM Industrial Products’ economical industrial workbenches and other furniture solutions.

The Model A-109PE Industrial Workbench above is one of RDM’s most popular industrial workbenches. It’s a light duty workbench with no lower crossmember supports, but it’s still tough thanks to its durable, fully-welded steel construction. It supports many, many customization options.

The Model F-103PE Overhead Shelf Workstation is a cost-effective solution for light duty computing. Like the A-109PE, it is greatly customizable – that’s the advantage of buying from the manufacturer.

1P-K Series Static Control Ergonomic Chair shows that you don’t need to sacrifice comfort and safety to stay within your industrial furniture budget. This is a full-featured industrial chair with static-control vinyl upholstery, lumbar support and enough adjustability to suit any member of your staff.

These are just a few of RDM Industrial Product’s economy furniture models. If you’re ready to outfit your shop with professional industrial furniture and want to get the best value for your dollar, Contact RDM today!

Three Reasons Why Everyone Needs Quality Industrial Furniture

May 5, 2009

What do RDM’s industrial furniture and the space shuttle have in common? Both of them have landed at White Sands Missile Range. In 2007, RDM was awarded two defense contracts to build furniture and lockers for White Sands. All in all, RDM provided over $22,000 in products and services to upgrade the base’s storage and furnishings.

Why did White Sands go with RDM? We provide unmatched value for the cost: the kind of quality that they could rely on in an environment that cannot tolerate poor performance of any kind. They need industrial furniture that conforms to their best practices – and so do you. Here are three reasons why you should choose RDM:

Ergonomic Industrial Furniture Reduces Accidents

RDM can create custom shapes and sizes for most of its industrial furniture catalogue, along with ergonomic additions to make virtually any workstation more efficient. This is critical in an environment like White Sands, where staff track missiles, aircraft and other high performance technologies. They need industrial furniture that gets out of the way of their workflow – and so do you.

Custom Industrial Furniture Creates a Controlled Environment

RDM Industrial Products is uniquely diverse. Few laboratory and industrial furniture manufacturers have so many products and capabilities under one roof. That means RDM is capable of not only providing furniture that stands up to extreme stress from heavy loads, heat and chemical reactions, but they can also provide lab tables and other furniture to satisfy cleanroom quality controlled environments. With RDM, you never have to choose between the ideal and convenient solution – RDM Industrial Products provides both, so that you can order industrial furniture that creates the exact environment you need from one source.

RDM’s Industrial Furniture Saves Money

RDM secured the White Sands contract because they provided the best value. RDM’s manufacturing and sales are under one roof, so there’s no need to pay a middleman. RDM manufactures most of our products on site, minimizing reshipping costs that they would otherwise have to pass on to our customers. Please Contact RDM for your Industrial or Lab Furniture needs. See the difference that a complete solution provider makes.

What’s a Ball Transfer Table? Why Do You Need One?

March 3, 2009

If you operate an up and coming manufacturing facility there will come a point where off the shelf industrial furniture solutions that used to be cost effective start to impose additional costs. These additional costs can result from things such as ergonomic-related accidents and the added expense of an inefficient production line. That’s when it’s time to upgrade to RDM’s industrial furniture solutions that are tailor made for your specific business needs. RDM is experienced in providing user-specific solutions, which may include a few option suggestions you may not have considered.

An excellent example is the ball transfer table. Ball transfer systems ease the movement of heavy materials across a production line. Even when upper body strength is a prerequisite in your shop, using raw strength to move products around usually results in delays due to fatigue, traffic jams on the production line, damaged materials, and/or even workplace injuries.

A full scale pneumatic ball transfer system is essentially a set of rolling spheres that can be raised and lowered as needed. There are systems available with only partial area ball transfer functionality as well. With this system, you can easily slide an item from your main roller line across the ball transfer station and freely rotate and adjust it until you need apply traction by lowering the balls. At this point, you can set the system to hold the item in place, do what you need to do, and then raise the balls to transfer the item again across the production line. Fixed ball transfer tops (most economical) are also available…

If you’re serious about a safe, efficient production process you owe it to yourself to investigate an RDM ball transfer system as an addition to any industrial workbench. At RDM, we have several models to choose from and we can also design / build custom ball transfer systems to fit your situation. Whether you have a small shop or a large factory, RDM Industrial Products is ready to build industrial furniture with the dimensions and characteristics you need. Contact RDM for your industrial furniture needs.

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.

Gallery Spotlight: Hydraulic Lift Tables

October 29, 2008

Being able to raise work to the right height improves its quality, because it eases manual labor. It gets things done faster, because you can perfect your work flow between stations by (for example) adjusting your station’s height to be the same as that of an adjoining station. These are just two of the reasons you’d buy a hydraulic lift table. Let’s take a look at some of the ergonomic industrial furniture that RDM Industrial Products provides.

This is an animated .gif of one of our hand-cranked hydraulic tables. Note the wheels on this model. They allow you to easily switch from a stable to a mobile configuration.

This animation shows a table with an electric motor. This provides power to heavy duty models, where a hand crank just won’t provide the lift. This only makes sense, because our toughest models can support up to 20,000 pounds.

This is our stainless steel model. It’s often used as lab furniture because the design ensures easy sterilization.

Remember to contact us about industrial furniture so we may better understand and meet your needs.

RDM Industrial Products Background

September 19, 2008

Established in 1977, RDM has been in the California Bay Area for over 30 years. We’re right in the heart of the Silicon Valley. We’ll provide your company with the quality products and services you demand on schedule without taking short cuts on quality.

We produce workbenches, lab tables, technician workstations, lift tables, laminar flow stations with HEPA filtration, We also manufacture commercial cabinets (European-style with slab type doors), service counters, reception counters, conference tables, counter tops, display and store fixtures, and laboratory cabinets and tops. Our product lines are constantly expanding, and that’s before you count the great deal of custom work we do. For over 30 years, RDM has concentrated on making the furnishing fit the space – not the other way around.

As a distributor, we offer many of the peripheral products that compliment our manufactured products, such as laboratory and cleanroom seating, storage cabinets, file cabinets, wire shelving, carts, ESD static control products, and many ergonomic solutions such as foot rests, keyboard holders, flat screen monitor stands, CRT monitor stands.

If you are local to the Bay Area, come and visit our showroom, located near the Heart of Silicon Valley at 1652 Watson Court in Milpitas, California, where you can view our many styles of lab tables, workstations, workbenches and their accessories. Here you can see our specialty table models in action, like our ergonomic lift table which is equipped with an electronically-operated hydraulic lift system (Model A-107P, Lift Table), or our double sided workstation (Model T-101P), ball-transfer tables, heavy duty tables, LAN workstations, laminar flow stations, and much more.

Gallery Spotlight: Reception Counters

September 19, 2008

RDM has a huge selection of industrial furniture, lift tables and lab furniture – so much that it almost distracts from the fact that we build plenty of front office furniture too. This week we’ll look at our reception counters.

This is a particularly photogenic model with a black marble finish.

This counter represents a blending of appearance and practical considerations. The counter is actually being used for coffee service and was built to fit that duty as well as blend in with the rest of the area.

What We Do

August 21, 2008

RDM Industrial Products specializes in meeting the needs of clients who want a mix of sophistication and traditional durability. For instance, RDM customizes its adjustable table designs to satisfy their clients’ unique size and load requirements. Their lift table selection also demonstrates these values in action by offering numerous options to modify the basic design. These include clean room standard surfaces and motor-assisted lifting.

RDM’s been in the business for 30 years. Located in the competitive San Francisco Bay Area, RDM builds staple furnishings for local high-tech firms, such as the lab tables these clients need to assemble precision products. Packaging tables also display RDM’s ability to manufacture more specialized furniture solutions.

From flow tables capable of eliminating particulate contamination to tough commissary kiosks, the company’s commitment to custom solutions is reflected in the way it can cater to each industry without sacrificing quality. Obviously, cafeteria checkouts and microprocessor manufacturing have vastly different needs, but the company manages to cater to both by adhering to high manufacturing standards. This applies to general industrial workbenches as much as unique lab equipment. That’s why RDM has lasted for three decades in one of the most challenging local economies in the world, and why they’re the first choice for so many companies.