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How Can Manufacturing Human Factors Help Save a Company:
Intervention at High and Low Levels

Abstract

Now that manufacturing has become a respectable topic in industry, an obvious question is how
human factors/ergonomics can contribute to the improvement of manufacturing. The traditional route
for ergonomics intervention has been a Project route, with a set of objectives agreed between the human
factors engineer and people within the company. Projects, however, do not ask the question of whether
human factors intervention is likely to have an impact on the company's strategic objectives, for
example, remaining in the manufacturing of a particular product

Case studies in a variety of industries are used to conrrast the project approach with a more
strategic approach. It is concluded that the project may represent sub-optimization in that a successful
outcome of the project may have no impact upon company survival without a careful examination of the
strategic plans of the company

MANUFACTURING IS CHANGING

The past ten years have seen the realization that
if the USA is to compete successfully in the world,
manufacturing cannot be neglected. Lessons from more
successful manufacturing nations have been learned by
companies of different sizes, and the results are
beginning to be seen in manufacturing excellence

Perhaps the most fundamental change in the way
leading companies treat manufacturing is to focus more
clearly on the ultimate objectives of the company.
Almost every company of any size now has a "Mission
Statement" with fine words about customer satisfaction
and product quality which, if heeded, would radically
change the way the company thinks. This change is
truly radical as it is forces employees at all levels to
evaluate their decisions against very specific outcomes.
These outcomes rarely include the traditional measures
of monthly output, labor cost variances, minimum first
cost of investment, or machine utilization; measures
which most company employees have known to be the
overriding criteria in day-to-day operations

At higher levels, companies are now undertaking
strategic planning to aid the long-term shaping of the
company. Not every opportunity should be pursued,
only those which fit long-term goals, goals which are
themselves based on an honest assessment of the
strengths and weaknesses of the company. Thus a
company may abandon a traditional market for large
scale mass-production of identical components to
concentrate on manufacturing a customized family of components at lower production volumes. In this way it
can be extremely responsive to customer needs, a key
component of customer satisfaction

Such responsiveness cannot be achieved without
changes in traditional production systems. Quality is
essential: any defect will have an immediate impact
upon output, an impact which cannot be hidden from the
customer by large inventories in a highly responsive
manufacturing environment. Responsiveness also forces
decreased reliance on a multi-level decision-making
hierarchy. Hence the modern emphasis on well-trained
self-organizing small groups (or cells) which are
responsive directly to customer needs. When response
time, quality, and training come to the fore in
manufacturing industry, so must human factors
engineering.

HUMAN FACTORS IN MANUFACTURING

One arena in which the USA is a major power is
in human factors/ergonomics so that it is natural to
consider how we can use this power to improve
manufacturing. Results to date have been less than
spectacular, with major human factors involvement
mainly in nuclear power production (for cognitive and
behavioral interventions) and in a variety of
manufacturing industries at the level of musculo-skeletal
injury reduction. Results in this context means having
an impact on the company's major decisions of which
markets to pursue, where to manufacture goods and how
manufacturing contributes to overall company goals

On a strategic basis, if the USA has a lead in
human factors, that lead should be exploited in
manufacturing. We have had numerous examples from
around the world of how human factors can be a key
element in manufacturing. Harris & Chaney’s book
(1969) was based on a major implementation of
ergonomics within the quality control function of an
aerospace company. On a smaller scale Hasselquist
(1981) showed how redesigning a line on ergonomics
principles had a productivity payback period of less than
half a year, with the added bonuses of a halving of the
error rate and elimination of musculo-skeletal injuries.
The authors suspect that most ergonomists could
produce similar examples from their files.

But the direct impact of human factors on the
manufacturing system which has been changed is really
not the whole question. For example, a program of
ergonomic changes in a shoe manufacturing company
(Drury & Wick, 1984) was particularly successful in
reducing muscular skeletal injuries in the plant, but it
did not prevent eventual closure of the plant as the
parent company responded to foreign competition.
Even a four-year program of ergonomics throughout the
company (which was estimated to have saved over $6
million in productivity increases and injury reduction)
was not enough to prevent closure of the ergonomics
department with the rest of the engineering functions
after a hostile take-over.

Part of the reason for human factors still not
being of central impact on manufacturing is the way in
which we have traditionally intervened. Whether the
ergonomics expertise comes from a group inside the
company or external to the company, the typical
intervention consists of a project. This project is
defined by both the customer and ergonomists in such a
way that both groups are satisfied with the potential
outcome and the intervention methodology.
Unfortunately, the customers and human factors
engineers may have reached a satisfactory
understanding at the wrong level.

Human factors engineers are trained to ask
technical questions (What is your workhest schedule?
How do you extract information from that display?) but
only have a rudimentary idea of the system functioning
beyond this level in manufacturing industry. Thus, ideas
of customer satisfaction with cost, on-time delivery and
quality are addressed, if at all, in terms of cycle times
and error rates. Our customers are often little better. A
safety manager may wish to reduce lost-time injuries, an
R & D manager may wish to estimate performance of a
prototype system or a quality control manager many
wish to reduce human-caused errors. At these levels,
the two parties can talk comfortably, as the connections
between their variables are reasonably obvious. But
what if the customer’s problem has no impact on the
company’s fortunes: Or what if the ergonomist’s time
should be better spent with another project or another
company? We all have a duty to ensure that what may
be a scarce national resource (human factors talent) is
used to maximum advantage.

In contrast the military typically has learned
many years ago that human factors expertise needs to be
continuously available throughout system development
(e.g. Meister, 1971) where it can impact on the broader
aspects of systems effectiveness. Can we make use of
this model in a manufacturing environment where the
higher level customers are (at best) skeptical about
human factors, and the human factors engineers are
untrained in such areas as strategic planning, cost
accounting or employmenflabor policies?

One way in which human factors can maximize
its strategic impact on manufacturing is to be part of a
team which operates at the strategic level. This means
that the team interacts with, and reports to, the highest
levels in management and union so that the strategic
aspects of the intervention are explicitly part of the
project. It does mean however that the intervention will
not be seen as an ergonomics intervention, but as an
indistinguishable part of the overall systems
intervention.