KIMEA Cloud driving team accountability at Danone France
Danone, a company with a Mission committed to its employees
The story of Danone began in 1919 with the Spanish businessman Isaac Carasso, who manufactured and marketed the first industrial yoghurts called ‘Danone’ in pharmacies.
Today, Danone is a world leader in over 120 countries with four core businesses: Plant-based Dairy Products, Waters, Baby Nutrition and Medical Nutrition.
In France, since 2020, Danone has also adopted the “Société à Mission” status : it becomes the first French company to include its raison d’être, “to bring health through food to as many people as possible” in its corporate status with objectives that are both social and environmental.
As a committed company, Danone France is actively involved in the health and safety of its employees and adapts to the daily challenges of prevention at its various logistics bases in France. To meet these challenges, a number of initiatives have been put in place to improve working conditions for employees and to prevent MSDs.
We went to meet Alexis Overne, Head of Danone’s Ergonomics Unit in France, who takes us into the world of MSD prevention at Danone France.
*Société à Mission : This involves a company publicly stating its “raison d’être”, as well as one or more social and environmental objectives that it sets out to pursue as part of its business, according to French Pacte law in 2019.
Danone France in figures
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on the territory
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Promoting a “culture of ergonomics”: a desire to reinforce good practice at logistics sites
At Danone, preventing health risks in the workplace is a priority, particularly in the face of MSDs, which particularly affect jobs at logistics bases. Employees at these bases have to deal with repetitive physical handling, with many loads being carried.
Danone France has a team of ergonomists with a wide range of responsibilities: they are involved in designing production lines, carrying out studies on workstations in the event of accidents or occupational illnesses, helping disabled employees to remain in work, and also carrying out joint risk mapping. Although the team consists of three ergonomists, the ergonomic culture needs to be developed more widely to ensure effective prevention at all Danone sites and in France.
This is why, in addition to the expertise of the ergonomists already in place, a strategy has been launched to set up ergonomics referents. The aim is to develop a genuine “ergonomics culture” at each site.
In addition to the ergonomists, Health and Postural Economy Programme Leaders (“Animateurs Programme d’Économie Posturale et Santé” – APEPS in french) have been specially trained at the logistics bases. The APEPS are referents trained by the ergonomists to disseminate good practice in handling boxes and designing and unloading pallets. The aim is to raise awareness among employees in the field and promote a culture of ergonomics.
To reinforce this culture within the teams and support the sharing of good handling practices, Alexis and his team decided to turn to Moovency, in search of a interactive and objective tool.
The KIMEA tool to support the work of ergonomists and APEPS Danone France
Legitimised monitoring
To optimise the monitoring of practices and effectively raise employee awareness, Alexis’ team has installed KIMEA Cloud on its logistics bases, with the main aim of optimising postures and preventing the risk of MSDs.
A genuine management tool, KIMEA Cloud incorporates a range of ergonomic standards and analysis grids, automatically assessing joint stress and identifying risk situations using all the quantitative data collected. The user benefits from different levels of analysis and precise risk scores, associated with exposure times.
Already equipped with other joint risk analysis tools, the ergonomists chose to integrate KIMEA for three main reasons: its intuitive interface, its ease of use and, above all, its flagship function – video processing. The latter is fully in line with their vision of a tool capable of reinforcing the ergonomic culture on sites.
KIMEA lets us share what we can’t necessarily see with the naked eye.
Alexis OVERNE
Head of Ergonomics Unit France at Danone
The tool has a twofold objective for Danone: to raise awareness of good practices among teams and to use KIMEA for detailed analyses in the event of accidents.
The APEPS, key players in this approach, have been trained to use KIMEA in order to promote good working practices by raising awareness among teams using this tool. KIMEA Cloud provided a strong educational dimension by enabling the APEPS to visualise the awkward movements and postures at their workstations. Thanks to the 2D display of the skeleton, risk scores and figures, the tool provides APEPS with additional arguments for raising awareness among employees on site.
KIMEA provides immediate feedback to employees, enabling them to see the impact of certain working postures. This visual dimension makes it easier to understand high-risk gestures, reinforcing the commitment of teams to the prevention approach, as one of the national APEPS referents can testify:
I’ve been training our order pickers for over 15 years in gestures and postures at our logistics base, which now employs around 110 people.
We recently discovered the KIMEA tool, and it is now used by all the APEPS in France to provide individual support to our employees. Thanks to KIMEA’s artificial intelligence, we have access to details invisible to the naked eye. The tool enables us to film an employee by targeting the necessary areas – either the upper or lower part of the body – while guaranteeing confidentiality: when the footage is returned to the cloud platform, the face is automatically blurred.
The colour codes associated with the different areas of the body (green, yellow, orange, red) make the points of tension immediately visible to the employee, whether on the upper limbs, lower limbs or trunk. During the debriefing, we gain in credibility because the person themselves visualises the areas that need to be improved. Once this stage has been completed, we can work together to define an action plan for the next coaching session, which is recorded in an internal file.
KIMEA also helps us analyse workplace accidents, if necessary, by recreating the movements and postures involved in the incident. In this way, the system helps us to prevent MSDs and improve day-to-day safety.
Jean-Philippe AUBRAS
National representative at Danone
Precise analyses for enhanced prevention
The tool is also used to assess accidents on logistics sites: by performing before-and-after analyses of work situations, KIMEA Cloud can identify high-risk situations and the most strenuous operations, which can lead to pathologies or joint pain.
This is particularly useful for logistics bases, where repetitive tasks and physical handling are regular sources of RSI.
For Alexis, the tool is also an additional means of objectifying one of the aspects of the NF X35-109 standard on awkward postures. While it is difficult to identify awkward postures with the naked eye, especially for recently trained ergonomics referents, the tool is proving to be an invaluable aid in obtaining an objective assessment of awkward postures.
Benefits observed since using KIMEA
The initial feedback from the teams has been very positive,’ stresses Alexis Overne.
A strong educational impact on teams
By visualising postures, KIMEA enables employees to immediately perceive the risks associated with certain postures or repetitive movements. This visual approach makes it easier to share good practice (and discover new ones!) and encourages employees to take individual responsibility.
Objective support
Whether it’s for educational purposes, measuring accidentology or analysing workstations, the KIMEA Cloud tool has made it possible to identify risks objectively. In this way, the tool provides added value for APEPS, giving them concrete support to legitimise their work and the MSD prevention approach.
KIMEA Cloud helps us to carry out analyses, for day-to-day teaching and ongoing training of employees, as well as taking part in on-site accident analyses.
Alexis OVERNE
Head of Ergonomics Unit France at Danone
Collective capitalisation of the prevention approach
The tool enables each site to share its progress more effectively. The various national APEPS use the tool to exchange analyses and pass on information. By centralising data from multisite projects, KIMEA Cloud enables analyses to be shared securely in a cloud environment.
This multi-site collaboration makes it possible to take advantage of the prevention initiatives of each logistics base, and creates a common momentum around the prevention approach, so that it can be capitalised on together.
The adoption of KIMEA Cloud by the teams at the logistics bases is helping to spread a genuine ‘ergonomics culture’ within Danone France. The tool enables us to involve not only the ergonomists, but also the APEPS and the operators in a collective approach to prevention and well-being.
What are the prospects for the future?
Having developed the tool on the logistics sites, Alexis and his teams’ long-term aim is to roll it out to Danone France’s production sites. The aim would be to train new APEPS, this time specialising in production site practices, and to train them in the tool in order to standardise the prevention culture and share skills.
Conclusion
With the integration of KIMEA Cloud, Danone France is strengthening its commitment to the health and safety of its employees. By deploying the tool in its logistics bases, the company is responding to the concrete challenges of MSD prevention, by combining objective risk analysis and active education. Thanks to KIMEA, ergonomists and APEPS can disseminate safer handling practices and directly involve teams in the field.
This initiative is thus part of a wider approach to ergonomics culture, supported by effective collaboration between sites and a shared sense of responsibility among employees.
Many thanks to Alexis Overne and Jean-Philippe Aubras from Danone France for this feedback!