MR. ALEXANDER: This workshop is on evaluating ergonomic programs. My name is Dave Alexander, and I will be moderator today as well as presenting some of the information. With me today, I have Mike Fleming from Sara Lee Knit Products and Bill Holt from DuPont, and they will be telling me some of their experiences as well.

As we get started, let me outline their particular backgrounds. Mike is a Division Ergonomics Manager for Sara Lee Knit Products. It is, of course, a part of Sara Lee Corporation. They are a diverse manufacturer branded underwear, print wear and casual wear apparel under the brand names of Hanes, Hanes Her Way, Team Hanes and so on. Mike will present the Sara Lee Knit Products approach to effective program management, particularly covering multiple sites and how to gain accountability in the process through goal setting and implementing a measurement system designed to achieve long term continuous improvement in the ergonomics process and culture. I want to emphasize that. Mike provides direction and coordination for roughly 50 sites, both in the U.S. and off shore, and coordinating that many is a common problem that ergonomists face. Mike has faced that challenge, has dealt with it with elegance and grace, and I want you to hear his approach to how he is doing that.

Bill Holt is, of course, with DuPont. He began his career with them in 1959, after receiving a degree in Chemistry from the Virginia Military Institute. He has worked with DuPont in both Texas and Virginia. He has held positions in manufacturing technical research and for the past 17 years safety and occupational health. In addition to the more traditional duties as a safety professional, consisting of injury illness investigation and compliance to safety standards, Bill is the site resource for hazardous materials shipping regulations. He is an NRC licensed radiation safety officer and he is a site ergonomics resource and has been for this is his 10th anniversary in that role. So he brings a very interesting perspective of longitudinally measuring ergonomic programs and evaluating them. You will be able to see the dynamics of how that changes over time. Again, it is a very important perspective as our ergonomic programs mature.

The Richmond plant currently has 23,000 employees. It produces five products. Some of the exotic things that you dealt with in your safety and health career Nomex, Kevlar, Tyvek, Teflon and Mylar. A new product, ZytelŪ, is expected to come on this year. The wide variety of product sizes and weights and the constant construction of new facilities has offered many challenges and opportunities to the ergonomics program all the way from initial design to retrofits. So these people will be covering some very useful information for you as ergonomics coordinators, ergonomic program managers.

What I would like to do is just spend a few minutes outlining the issue of ergonomics programs and then I would like to provide some background from Auburn Engineers and some of the clients we have worked with on different methodologies for evaluating ergonomics programs. If I may, I will step down to the overhead and work from there. Can you all hear this? Is this satisfactory? Good.

When we start looking at ergonomic programs, one of the keys is to recognize that ergonomics programs, the whole area of ergonomic program manager is a complicated area. There are a lot of different facets to it. What we intend to do today is simply focus on one, on the evaluation component, but clearly there are other pieces in planning evaluation or implementation, the design of the program and all of those things that are important as well.

What has always intrigued me is that ergonomics has had such an emphasis on measurement. Its very root is in measurement, how we measure people. Unfortunately, we haven't measured the business aspects of ergonomics very well, and that continues to come and haunt us. We hear people talking about cost benefit, cost justification, program effectiveness, when are we done, when have we started, why should we do it, and all of those issues come to the floor with the business measurement issues.

What we want to do today on the panel is to present and highlight the importance of ergonomic program evaluations. We want to look at measurement systems, methodologies, some feedback groups, some management systems, how do you interact with management, how do you get them on board, what are successful strategies and, frankly, what do they tell you and why should you do them.

Many people have come to me and I have been practicing for about 25 years now and have talked about -- we have a very successful program, and I am always asked how do you know. What is it that makes a program successful? The bottom line is I look for two things when someone is telling me the program is successful. If I see these two things, I believe them. If I see one or the other, I may be a little skeptical.

The first one is the change in performance. In fact, we have made a difference. The second one is systems that support that change, so I know it is not a Hawthorne affect, somebody tampering with numbers, somebody fiddling with things or something that is going to reverse itself in a few months or next year. Then we can even look at that in a little more detail if we want to because when we look at the step changes in performance what we find is there is a continual array of measures that will change over time. At first we may look at workers' compensation costs, and our first step change may be simply to drive those down. Then we may look at severity rates. We may look at OSHA log rates and try to drive them down.

Many people stop at that point, when, in fact, there are many additional gains to be made. We can look at discomfort rates, lower risk factors and even go into more and more leading indicators, but what we want to do is continue to make step changes in our performance side. We also want to look at the systems which influence that, and there are many systems I will be talking about them as my presentation progresses. Certainly, we have systems for identification of problem. We have systems for creating corrective actions and implementing them, for developing preventive actions and so on.

It is interesting when I talk about operating systems sometimes people don't understand exactly what I am talking about. So let me give you an example. Let's say someone in your plant has a laceration on the operating floor. A couple of things happen automatically. First, you are going to get the person to medical. You are going to stabilize the injury. There is going to be treatment if you have an in-house clinic. Pre-approved is the ability to take the person out of the plant to a nearby hospital, if that is necessary for the injury, and almost from the minute the person arrives at the treating facility rehabilitation, return to work is being discussed and planned.

The supervisor may secure the area to perform an investigation and develop corrective action, and the next morning in the work managers' meeting, they are going to be talking about what was the injury, what did the investigation tell us, what are the corrective actions, what should we do to prevent that from happening again. If those are satisfactory corrective actions, the supervisor probably is assigned the responsibility of implementing those changes and there may be communications to other departments who have similar problems.

That is an operating system. It occurs whether the safety director is in the plant or not. It is driven down to the lowest levels in the organization. It occurs automatically. It is a work system.

What happens if somebody reports a similar level of injury or illness and it happens to be a shoulder problem? The first thing we say is that maybe you will feel better tomorrow. It may not be recorded. If it is treated, if somebody goes to medical they may receive some treatment. There is probably very little interaction with the operating department. There is not much of an investigation that occurs. Corrective actions are not developed by the line organization. We call the ergonomist, if we have one in the front end, and if not, we call headquarters and see when this person can come down. Very clearly, we have got an operating system in one case. We don't have it in the other, and that is what we need. So when we talk about the systems and how they should occur, those are the kinds of things that I am speaking of.

Ultimately, we want to define the ergonomics culture. I have got one definition of this. Bill has got another that he will be sharing later on, but we can look at contrasts. I don't want to go through all of these, but if we look at business as usual, it says ergonomics is an expense. What is the ergonomics culture? It says ergonomics is an investment. Business as usual says ergonomics is required. OSHA is going to get you. Workers' comp. is too high. The ergonomics culture says we use it because it is good business, and I have reported on these in other arenas and many people have seen these contrasts and say that describes a good ergonomics culture. But, I think that is what we want to do when we look at evaluations is how close are we getting to those kinds of things.

Let me provide an overview for you now of some evaluation methodologies that we have used, and I will describe some situations where we have used these with a variety of clients, and I have got some examples that I think will be helpful for you. There are three areas that I want to discuss. The first one is to create a distinction between project evaluation and program evaluation. They are very different, and they are commonly confused.

When we look at ergonomic projects -- that is a technical aspect of a work job analysis problem solving and preventing problems. When we look at ergonomics programs that is managerial skills, planning, coordination, evaluation, execution, those types of issues. We learn the first in college. We learn the second in the school of hard knocks, if we learn them at all.

When we look at project evaluation what we find is that there are many tools. In fact, there are many established measures and tools, and frequently as ergonomists we find ourselves debating which one is the best. We have such an abundance of these things. We find methodologies are there. There are plenty of examples. Typically, there is a finite boundary and scope. We look at before and after.

When you look at program evaluations, protocols are evolving. There are more protocols than most people thing because they are still in the process of evolving. There is a very small experience base and not a lot of people are really doing this with any broad degree. It is much more global in scope. You can't put boundaries around it quite as easily, and that makes it a little more difficult. So first contrast is program versus project. Program is much broader.

Second is the difference between an operating site and a corporate evaluation. It was interesting yesterday. Brad Joseph was talking about his panel and how they had one person from an operating site and one from a division level and one from a corporate environment. They are very different evaluations when you start looking at ergonomic programs. One of the things that we can do -- and those of you who have followed my work for any period of time, know that I frequently talk about an ergonomics process. How do you implement it at an operating site? You use a six step methodology from initiating to exit the process and provide maintenance. There are certain time tables associated with this. They are fairly predictable kinds of things. We know what should happen and what the timing is and how to put these elements into place.

The parallel that I draw is this is like getting a college degree. It takes about four years. It cost a little bit more than a college degree, but it is the same kind of process. If one of your children is in college, you ask what kind of courses they are taking, and if they are still taking calculus one when they are supposed to be a junior, there is a problem there and you need to know about it and you need to take corrective action. It is not to say that this can't take longer than four years because frequently it does. It is like for some of us getting through college took more. I myself crammed four years of college into five years and had a great time doing it. My parents, on the other hand, weren't so pleased with that, but we could look at this.

What this affords us to do is an opportunity for evaluation. Where are we? We can see where we are in those steps, just like you can check the number of credit hours and how much money you have spent. In fact, we can track this at multiple sites, which is an example of one thing I did with a particular client. We were interested in where the sites were, not from a comparison standpoint as much as what resources would be made in the coming year, and we can see where people are.

A couple of interesting opportunities when we look at it. These groups, obviously, need quite a bit of resource for a period of time. We are also seeing some people up here who need to transition out and stabilize. They need to back off on some of the ergonomics efforts because they are getting there and have got good programs in place and it is time to perhaps move on to other opportunities.

This was a model that we did for a distribution operation within the state of Alabama. By the way, I am from Alabama. Maybe you all picked that up with my accent. There is something about the snow storm out there makes me just want to get in the car and drive. I don't know what it is.

But, we look at the kind of corporate environment, if you will, and what you find is that I have got to tell you the processing centers, they have very different kinds of needs. They are going to be primarily VDT operations, very different from material handling centers, which are material handling, lugging, toting, pushing, pulling, these kinds of things. Programs don't fit all of those. We need customized programs from each of the different aspects of those. We looked at the retail centers, low opportunities. We have got to have a lot of solutions, low costs, and, in fact, we can put together a big picture. This is one that I did for another organization, but as you can see, we have got different kinds of site structures, large and small. In some cases they are staggered.

In some cases they happen all at once. We have got pilot plants. We have got North American. We have got international. We have got our prevention area, engineering construction and purchasing. You should see our time table. One is out from 1995 out passed 2000. From a corporate standpoint, we can put that together. What does this become? It becomes a very nice evaluation tool. We can check off and see where we are, and it is all based on being able to predict what is going to happen. So those are very helpful.

The last thing I want to talk about is what I call baseline versus mature, versus world class programs. Most of us are stuck doing baseline kinds of evaluations. There is a lot more that we can do and based on the time. It is interesting to go back and look at how quality was measured, and we learn a lot from the quality and quality measurement systems. What we find is that in the past we used to think that good quality programs looked at outgoing or product quality. We would inspect it, reject what was bad, fix it and send the other stuff on its way. That clearly was a lagging measure. In retrospect we know that is a very immature system.

What we now know is that you can look at internal or manufacturing qualities, basically doing things real time, fixing problems real time before we create poor product, and ultimately for very mature systems, we can use leading measure. We can look -- we know we do such a good job in a manufacturing process if the only source of variability is our incoming or supplier materials. So what do we do? We begin to work with them to make sure they can provide us with a consistent product so that our process can work effectively.

What does this have to do with ergonomics? Frankly, everything because what we find ourselves stuck in is continuing to try and measure flagging indicators. We are constantly focused on ergonomics injuries and illnesses, clearly problems that the cow is out of the carrel at that point. We need to be looking at a minimum of our internal levels which is pain and discomfort, real time where we can make changes. Ultimately, we need to get over into the incoming area, looking at new jobs, looking at tools, equipment that is coming in, looking at new plants and processes, and that will be an indicator of mature systems.

We can overlay this. When I look at ergonomic programs and how we measure there is a nice little correlation between what we are measuring in the maturity of our system. I want to talk about these three levels. One is called the baseline audit, and one is assessing the ergonomics program, and the other is an ergonomic program audit.

The baseline compliance audit is basically two pages, 31 questions, a very simple kind of document. If you all were interested in this, I would be happy to send you some of these, if you leave me a business card when the session is over. But it is more activity based kinds of things. Do you have a committee in place? Is there a written program? Do you have a coordinator? Have you done a basic review? It is all activity based. Those things hopefully lead to good results, but they don't in and of themselves insure that good results occur.

We could do a scoring on this. It is very visual. We can look at the 31 questions in all seven different areas, and we can just see the green indicate affirmative and white would indicate a gap. So you could go through and see we are doing pretty good on medical management, reasonable good on corrective actions, job assessments are in good shape, got a couple of good opportunities, one here in corrective actions, a little low on employee involvement, but it is very clear. You either have it or you don't, and if you don't have it, it is very clear what you need to do to get that.

A little more detailed assessment is what I call what we developed as assessing ergonomics program. We have been using it for about six or seven years now, and basically it looks at scoring in eight different areas, how you recognize problems, how you assess them, corrective actions, preventive, preventing problems, medical management training, how you organize and finally demonstrated results. You get a score. The total score -- we use a zero, one, two, three and four on there. Again, it is very much like the white form because people understand that so well.

Some of the questions -- just an example of what these might look like. On the use of lagging indicators, the OSHA 200 logs and workers' compensation data, we have got five descriptions. The OSHA 200 log problem only has errors. What is that an indicator of? A very poor program. We call that a bomb. You maintain the OSHA log correctly, it may have some unrecognized errors, but rarely, if ever, will you enter the workers' compensation data prepared. That is a fairly well planned program. It is easy to do that.

You maintain the OSHA log correctly and provide an annual summary, you have reviewed the workers' compensation records for patterns of ergonomic illness and injuries, it is a fair program and so on. You just simply match up the descriptor, provide a check off, and you can do the kind of scoring on this program. It takes about 45 minutes or an hour to walk through. This is what it looks like, and again, if you are interested in that, I would be happy to provide you with one of those if you want to leave me a business card.

When you get done you see a score that looks very much like this. When you look at the bar charts, it is fairly easy to see what are these folks doing well. Good organization. Reasonably good medical management. Good at correcting problems. We have got some gaps in a couple of areas. We're not doing so hot on preventing problems. Demonstrated results are a little bit of an issue. So it is very easy to see what is going on, and it is interesting that you can look at other patterns, very characteristic patterns of things that happened. This is an indicator of a fairly weak program. In this case there is some recognition in medical management due to high frequency of problems. There is an excessive focus on administrative controls, and probably only going to obtain marginal benefits. You can see the overall total scores and the full range.

Another interesting profile is what I call the technically strong ergonomists. They are really good at recognizing, assessing and collecting problems but misses the opportunity to involve medical people and engineering people. They may not be using the organization very well and doing fair on the demonstrated results. But clearly it is an opportunity to spread this out and build it into the operation.

The last type of program that I want to talk about is comparison to world class program. I am unaware of many people who are using this, but I think it is something that we will see more of in the future. When we look at a world class program, you need to think what are the best practices worldwide. We need to use tough auditing principles consistent with ISO 9000 where we don't just listen to somebody tell us what is going on, but we look at the paper trail, we see the documentation and we see the things that are going on. It is very much systems driven. There is a plan, performance, evaluate and there are feedback loops constantly built into every operating system. If we do a design, we go through and we create a new design. We provide feedback when it is over to make sure that it has been done well.

We have got one audit that we have developed around that. In fact, it was developed by a former OSHA compliance officer who was on our staff for awhile. There are 14 areas. We didn't just take those tools and substitute ergonomics for quality. We tried to look at what the intent was. There are some things that are quite different from most ergonomic evaluations. We look at document and form control. Where do you keep your form? How are the maintained? Are they consistently used? We looked at record control. Are those maintained? Where? For what life period? We did a focus on design control, purchasing, construction, installation and audits, some things that you may not find in the typical ergonomics program evaluation.

What does the score look like on that? Again, this is an organization that scores very well on the other programs, on the other evaluations but has got some gaps in some of these areas. You can see the documented form control, real opportunity, records retention, a real opportunity. The scores of 600 roughly out of 1,000. You are doing okay, but 600 out of 1,000 is in the D range, if you are scoring in college. So there is a lot of opportunity there.

We can see how these things change from time to time. If we look at the metrics we can go from activity based, establishing the committee, having meetings and so on to intermediate metrics which are outcome and results based. Not how many people are in the training force, but what kind of skills have they got. What kind of changes result from the training course. Don't tell me how many training course you have. Don't tell me how many hours they work. Don't tell me how many people went to it. I want to know how many tasks you changed when you finished that. So it is an outcome based findings.

Ultimately, we go to systems, looking at our surveillance system, making sure people had skills, corrective actions are in place, early reporting, all of those kinds of system. Not only are they in place, but by gosh, we audit them. We look at them. We make sure that they are continuing to work. That is very important.

I have got a few closing thoughts that I want to highlight, and, again, it is hard for me to talk about ergonomics without talking about dollars. The language to business is dollars. Somebody said that yesterday. Many times we talk injury illness. They talk dollars. Somebody has got to translate. Whose job is it? I maintain that we have got to learn how to talk. We can use that to help evaluate programs sometimes. This is an operation we worked with, a wood working operation interestingly enough.

We can look and see what were the changes. The annual workers' compensation cost dropped dramatically. The incidents per year dropped dramatically. It is a good consolidating measure that we can look at, very helpful when we are talking with other organizations about this is possible and you can do that. The fact that this is continued for a couple of years tends to say there are some systems in place, although I haven't given you any information at all about what those might be.

We have also looked at some of the other longer programs for large organizations, and we can literally project what kind of expenses you might have. You can see this is an investment driven model, investment up front. We do some stabilizing and maintaining costs later on. We can look at the benefits, which is how many improvements and what might those be worth. We can look at information to do some projection around that. Look at the applications concluded. Again, slow start, rising and steady state as more and more people become involved. All of these things are available, and we know enough to do projections around those.

One of the values of using the assessment is to determine your strengths and opportunities. As you do the evaluations you are really missing an opportunity if you are not doing that. You need to develop your vision. What the heck are you trying to accomplish? How do you share that with management so that they have got some idea of what is going on? You can open a dialogue with your management. You know what you want. What do they want? Do they want a world class ergonomics program or are they looking for something that is more compliance oriented? Do they want it in two years or do they want it in 10 years? Over what period of time? How should it dovetail with other safety and health systems?

This is a wonderful way to open a dialogue with, and what resources are available? Okay, you want this wonderful ergonomics program. You want it completed in two years, and you only want me working on it. Frankly, that dog didn't hunt. So you can talk about resources, outcomes, results all at the same time and get some consensus around that. It also helps with your strategic and tactical plans. We talked a little bit about that and how we can measure and track results.

What are the learnings? First, program evaluation is different than project evaluation. You can be measuring lots of projects and still not program evaluation. It is a different issue. It is critical that you manage what you measure. A lot of times we are not measuring things, so we don't manage them well. Management likes measurement and likes predicted measurement. If you can tell them what is going to happen ahead of time, they are your friends. There are a lot of tools available. We can learn a lot from quality. There are many tools available for ergonomics programs. I have two that I would be happy to share with you, if you would let me know you are interested in those.

You have got to use tools that are appropriate for the job that you are trying to measure. What is your maturity level? If you are just starting out, this simple, little baseline audit may be the best tool. As you become more mature, other tools are going to be more appropriate. Measures can insure change over time. If you are using the same set of measures for four or five years, you are doing something wrong. You need to design and use feedback loops and management systems. It is very important to have those put in place.

I am going to conclude and let the other folks tell you what they have been doing, and then we will come back at the end and have an opportunity for discussion and questions.