NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Thomas Albin, 3M
MR. TYSON: Let me start by introducing the first speaker, Tom Albin, from 3M. Tom is a senior ergonomics specialist with 3M. He's a licensed professional engineer and a certified professional ergonomist. He's also a member of the committee that revises the ANSI human factors engineering standard for computer workstations and was a member of the Cal-OSHA expert advisory committee during the development of the ergonomic standard.
At 3M, Tom has led the office of ergonomics effort as well as coordinating a team responsible for implementing ergonomics efforts in 3M's manufacturing facilities.
Please join me in welcoming Tom Albin.
MR. ALBIN: Our first reaction when we heard that there was going to be an ergonomics conference in Chicago and being located in Minnesota was to say, well, at least it'll be warm.
I'd like to practice a little ergonomics now and acquaint you with Tom's First Law of Ergonomics, and that is that the mind can absorb only as much as the bottom can endure. These are not the world's greatest chairs for long-term seating, so if you'd like to stand up during my presentation, I would strongly encourage you to do that.
I'm going to be talking today about six years of ergonomics at 3M.
This is just a brief introduction to 3M, or it will be in a minute.
3M has approximately 37,000 employees in the United States. These employees work in more than 100 locations in 34 states. These are generally small facilities, in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 people per facility.
What I'd like to do today is go through a description of why we developed an ergonomics program, how we've approached it, what we've learned, and some of the results that we've achieved.
Late in 1988, we developed and implemented a corporate-wide injury and illness data base. In 1990, the analysis of the data base showed that 35 percent of all of our OSHA recordable cases were ergo-related. By the way, when I use the term "ergo," I'm meaning musculoskeletal disorder.
Fifty-three percent of all of our lost-time cases were ergo related, and 55 percent of all our lost workdays were also ergo related.
This quantified a previous belief that ergo cases were a significant health and safety issue at 3M, and we were a little bit surprised, though, at the scope of the problem.
A first question that I think everyone should address is, first of all, do you have a problem. For 3M, as a corporation, the answer to this was a definite yes.
Now, a subsidiary question that you may want to address is, is it an issue of sufficient seriousness to warrant a special emphasis or can it be dealt with as part of a comprehensive health and safety program? Again for 3M, it seemed that a special emphasis program was appropriate.
Once we were satisfied we had a problem, a major health and safety issue, we did two things.
First of all, we alerted our management to the magnitude of the issue and began development of solution strategies.
Now, our previous approach had been to take the ergonomic expert to each problem, whether it was large or small. What we started to move to was to conceptualize a system to transfer ergonomics information to a much wider base within the company, and we also began to prioritize our efforts within the area of ergonomics.
We did an informal Pareto analysis which showed that manufacturing and offices accounted for most of our problem.
We have a wide variety of manufacturing operations. We've produced more than 65,000 products, ranging from roofing granules to heart-lung machines. The process that we were developing needed to be adaptable to this wide variety of operations.
When we tried this new concept out and a small number of demonstration plants and the resulting decrease in the incidence of ergonomic cases within those plants, suggested that we had a viable approach to dealing with the issue of manufacturing.
(Graph)
This is a chart that shows a best fit line for the demonstration plants, which is the upper line. I'm not sure how well that's in focus.
Can you see that? It looks out of focus to me.
In any case, the upper line is the demonstration plants, and you can see that there's a nice decreasing trend there towards the rest of the corporation.
Within offices, we thought we had a slightly different issue, much more homogeneous type of work than what we were seeing in manufacturing. We felt that effective solutions to the problems within the office were known and that the issue was more one of delivery of service.
At this point, we began to strategize about how do we make the case for implementing a corporate-wide program, so one of the things that we looked at is who has a common interest in addressing these issues. Within our organization, these went by names, such as loss control, medical disability management, and engineering.
I'd like to talk just a little bit about what some of these common interests were.
If we look at loss control, the insurance people, the people that deal with our medical insurance and our workers' comp costs, it was real apparent to them and to us that ergonomic cases had associated costs. Just for reference, I've put up some Liberty Mutual data. $8600 average cost for an upper extremity case, and $6800 for a back case.
As we all know, there are indirect costs associated with these.
The message that we try to make and the agreement that we try to establish with the loss control people was that decreasing the incidence of ergonomic cases was in line with their goal of reducing case costs.
Second group with common interest was our corporate medical department, our occupational medicine people. One of the things that we've constantly talked about is that early reporting facilitates better treatment, it's easier to do, less costly, more effective.
A second point was that by addressing hazards we move from treatment, a reactive approach, to prevention of problems.
With the disability management people, some of the issues were more successful, return to work if workplace issues are understood and resolved, and certainly more guidance for the modification of jobs for people coming back.
When we look at engineering, this may be a little bit different to think of engineering having a common interest, but we worked with some of our project engineers. When they looked at different lines, they were trained in ergonomics issues and they looked at the line, both from an ergonomic standpoint and from a production process standpoint, and they made an interesting statement that I've quoted here. One of the engineers said, ergo problem points were the same as the process bottlenecks. So they saw this as an opportunity to facilitate production.
We stirred this all together and took it to management, and this is the approach that we took. First of all, we said we have a problem. We know how to begin to address it. Here's the plan. The benefits are spread across the business, and we need your support to implement this.
Then we started a strategy of building momentum. Pick some low-hanging fruit to build some successes. Look for additional information to strengthen the case, increase productivity and morale.
In some of the plants where we've implemented ergonomics, we have consequently seen an increase in morale.
Finally, I think this is extremely important: You need to publicize your successes and your activities, whether that's as simple as posting before and after pictures on a bulletin board in a plant or whether you're putting articles in company newsletters, you need to get the information out there, but things are happening.
Plan for the long term. Keep in mind that what you're doing is an iterative process, that you're not always going to get it right the first time, that you're going to need to keep turning some things over.
You need to not be afraid to try new things. Use the Shewhart cycle: The plan/do/check and act.
Finally, this is the slide that was out. We'll skip that.
This is a chart that shows our manufacturing, OSHA recordable ergonomics cases as a percent of 1990. I'd like to do just a little bit of discussion about this.
We began to put our program in general implementation between 1991 and 1992. Between 1990 and 1996, we've seen a 22 percent decrease on all OSHA recordable cases. Now, what we've done here is we've expected to see only a small decrease in OSHA recordable cases because we wanted to encourage reporting. We didn't want to necessarily drive that particular data point down.
The next slide looks at our lost time cases in which we see an approximately 58 percent reduction from 1990 to 1996.
This shows some results that we saw. We observed a slight initial increase in recordable cases, then a gradual decrease. This is, I think, something that a lot of people have seen. What we did see almost immediately was a decrease in the number of lost time cases.
Here we have a chart that shows the OSHA recordable cases and the lost time cases superimposed so that you can see there's a time lag there between the OSHA recordable cases and the lost time cases.
Immediate decrease in lost time cases, somewhat of a lag in OSHA recordable cases.
Here are some other results that we've seen. We tend to initially think in terms of case incidence, but these are some results from manufacturing, in terms of cost savings. These are three lines that we've pulled out as examples.
One line spent $85,000 on improvements and achieved $225,000 annual savings.
The second line spent approximately $350,000, initial cost, and again realized approximately $350,000 in annual savings.
The third line spent $5000 and achieved a $10,000 annual savings.
So here you have approximately four month, one year, and six-month payback periods on some of the investments made for ergonomics.
Within offices, the strategy we took was a combination of training and evaluations to adjust work situations and install extra equipment, such as keyboard trays, document holders, wrist rests, et cetera.
We did this, we did a follow-up survey on symptomatic individuals seen for office ergonomic consults, and we found that approximately 90 percent had improved or completely resolved symptoms at the time of the follow-up survey.
So as a quick review, what did we do?
We set up an initial program that had two main components. One was reactive, one was proactive.
The reactive component, based on the red meat guidelines, management, commitment, employee involvement, hazard analysis, and abatement, medical management and training.
Proactive is a little bit different. One definition that's been put out for proactive is to look at existing jobs for hazards in the absence of cases associated with those jobs.
We have a slightly different spin on that. Our definition is to design new processes and equipment, ergonomically correct from the start.
Here's what we're doing currently: We've prioritized implementation, highest incidence plants first. We've saturated the organization with knowledge, whether that's engineers, office workers, or line workers. We're trying to get the ergonomics word out to them, and I think we've been reasonably successful doing that.
We've repositioned the ergonomist as a consultant to a problem solving group rather than acting as the primary problem solver, and finally we've put ergonomics in as part of our new equipment design process.
Quick review: first question to address is do we have a problem? If yes, how severe is it? What are you going to need to do to address it?
Develop information you can use to measure the success of program efforts. If you don't have that it's very difficult to convince people that what you're doing, or it may be very difficult to convince people that it's worth doing.
With regard to that, don't rely on a single data point, such as the incidence rate. As we saw with our OSHA recordable rate, the time lag there may really confuse you and suggest to you that what you're doing isn't effective when it really is having an effect. You just need to look at a little more data.
Finally, when presenting the plan, pitch the presentation to different target groups and tailor that. Whether you're going to management presented in terms that they're going to want to hear business terms; if you're going to line management, talk about more utilization, less turnover, less absenteeism, whatever.
Be flexible. Test new approaches in small manageable chunks. I think one of the experiences we had was we may have tried to bite off too much at the first.
Trust your data.
Again, saturate the organizations with knowledge.
Give the process time to work.
Finally, keep in mind that it's a culture change, a change in the way you think and not just another program.
Thank you.
MR. TYSON: Tom, thank you very much.
