NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Bradley Joseph, Ford Motor Company
DR. JOSEPH: Okay. By the way, that slide I was obviously a lot younger. That hair was darker in that slide.
I am Brad Joseph. I work for Ford Motor Company. You may have heard my boss up here earlier today. I am their corporate ergonomist. I work out of occupational health and safety and industrial hygiene, and my responsibilities are very similar to these folks' responsibilities.
DR. JOSEPH: And I have a corporate program. And recently we have expanded that to global, which is a real interesting exercise in itself. We are trying to expand into global, not to say that we weren't doing it before, but I think we are trying to look at a process.
I have to get a definition here. One of the themes of this conference is best practices, and I really thought about that quite a bit. And we are doing a lot in the company right now with things called lessons learned and best practices. And what we consider a best practice is a process or system that has been piloted and shows to add value to an existing process. Not necessarily you have to start all over. I know a lot of companies like to say, well, that doesn't work. Let's start over. Let's just crush what we have and rebuild the house. And that's kind of crazy.
And then once determined to be a best practice, it should be replicated throughout the company. And replicated has its points. Is it exactly replicated in Germany as it is in the United States or Canada? No, I don't think it is, but something,some elements, are replicated.
And I also think best practices in most processes are successful when they are small, incremental steps, not major --just sort of an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process. And that's going to be my theme today, as soon as I get this slide thing to work.
I want to start out with the logo, because I think it is kind of an important logo. You see our process is a joint process, and the theme of that logo is UAW/Ford ergonomics process. And I want to just give a little background into it and then explain some of the new or best practices that we are doing, some of the new things.
I think successful implementation of a process in ergonomics -- you have heard it up here and you heard it this morning -- involves a number of areas. You just can't look at one thing. You must look at both the technical or capital intensive part and the human resource and people part of the process. There is the people part of the fix.
You talked about the employee training programs, that look for problems in the workplace. We have a similar thing called guidelines, responsibilities and safe practices at Ford.
I think the bottom line of the program -- you have heard it here twice now, and the third -- I am going to say it a third time -- is people. And this is our mission values and guided principles. I know you can't see the unhighlighted part, but that was intentional. But one of the values of this company, of Ford Motor Company, is its people.
And as my boss and other folks said this morning, without people, you don't have a company. I don't care how much automation you put into the system; you still have to have people running it. And we find that a lot. Some of our engineers, some who are not adequately trained, don't think that way, but we are slowly moving that needle.
There are four basic personality types that I always like to talk about. These are the -- and I think this gets into the people issue. There is the people who think the glass is half full, the people who think the glass is half empty, the people who really can't decide and the person who really just wants a cheeseburger and doesn't really care.
And I think the bottom line of it is that we really need to look at our people we are involved with. And I think you saw in the videotape that those are people who want to be involved. I don't think these programs can run by elected people. I think they need to be people who want to be involved and are picked because of their involvement and their caring.
It also needs to look, quite honestly, at the plant operating organizations that we pull together. Ford's plants, if you look at it, are little cities in themselves or microcosms of the big company. In our plants there is -- this is a fairly generic organization chart, but most plants are separated like this. There are production areas and A, B and C. There could be more than that.
Then there is the support functions like quality control, finance, purchasing, engineering, employee relations and production. And really, a lot of times you focus your ergonomics programs on the employee relations side, and I don't think that -- I think that's a mistake, too. I think we could probably help run it, but we don't build anything in employee relations. We don't design jobs. We don't fix jobs. We tell people -- we tell the engineers when they have a problem.
So we have really got to get out there and work with the production people. And that's what I think the big difference is in where we are trying to go.
Ergonomics is sometimes a buzz word. For example, the office chair. What is the office chair today? But even if you do get the best office chair -- and these are not office chairs, by the way -- even if you do get the best office chair, you need to train people in how to use it. So there is always another people component. I think there is later on this afternoon ortomorrow a session just on training, which I think is very important, because without training, you can't have a good program without a good training process involved in it.
And this is a slide I got from one of our folks in Australia. He thought it was kind of funny when I was down there. It says, "You've got one of these kneeling chairs. Yes, indeed, my friends, it's time we joined the 20th century. The Danes invented these chairs years ago, totally ergonomic, far superior to the regular chairs. All of Europe uses them." And then the next slide is the Danes talking. Underneath is the interpretation. "Those silly Americans, they'll buy anything. I know. Let's take the Mueslix we feed our goats and sell it to them as breakfast cereal."
And the bottom line is that, you just can't make this fix of the month. You heard a lot of consultants being brought in up here, but you notice the consultants were not the program. These folks were the program. The consultants were helping the program. That's a key issue.
This is a really tough slide to see. Ford has a strategy in place for the year 2000. On the left-hand side -- I will just read it to you. We have a proactive process that deals with product design. In other words, we want to design our products to be “friendly” to build, -- that's proactive number one. I don't know if you can see that. But proactive process means that we look at our products to see if they are easy to build.
Product design really sometimes drives the manufacturing design. So one of our main efforts right now is to look at current products, see if we can fix those things to make sure they are easier to build. Once we do that, we want to lookat the process design, where we look at our manufacturing systems. And our primary focus here is the design and production systems, new production systems, so ergonomics solutions are into the design, its initial design. So we are like two years out before job one, talking to our engineers about that.
And the third and final is a reactive process. If you miss some issues, you also have to fix them. And we spent a lot of time the first five or six years looking at the current production process and finding and fixing those things. And you really have a limited amount you can do with that.
Our current process, this is our reactive process, was put together back in 1988. It had three major phases: process start-up, job improvement cycle, and long-term development. Process start-up was how to get the thing going. When you are launching 60 plants in the United States simultaneously -- well, within a 6-week period -- you kind of have to have a blueprint for the plants. And what we did was we put together a system where everybody started the same way. And the first step was management commitment. The same thing everybody else said up here.
The second step was identifying the -- we call them our local ergonomic committee, sort of the plant committee. It is called a local ergonomic committee. We had to select those people; not voted, they're selected.
The third thing was training those folks. The fourth thing was writing a mission statement. Boy, that was hard for them to do. That still is hard for them to do.
And the last section was developing a teamwork process. Throwing people into a room does not make a team. If you don't believe me, take a look at some of the football teams that areout of the playoffs right now. They are still pretty high-paid athletes, and I am sure they are pretty good athletes, but a team is different. They are the ones who win. So that's the process.
The second step is a job improvement cycle, and I think this is the core to our whole system. And you heard actually one of the persons on the tape talk about their job improvement cycle, identifying priority jobs, evaluating job stresses, developing and implementing solutions, document and follow-up. So that's the process that we use.
So once something is identified -- and there are a number of ways of identifying things -- then they have to be evaluated. They have to go through the cycle and things are documented. I don't spend a lot of time on this. This is kind of old news.
Does it work? I will give you a couple case studies. Cleveland Engine One, this is a more reactive plant. Sixty percent of the time was spent on reactive changes. Proactive, new equipment reviews. All plants get new equipment on a regular basis, but this particular plant spent a lot of time on -- it had an older product line, building an engine that has been around for a few years. So they really spent a lot of time looking at the existing process.
And I think the outcome of this was, this is the results from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and everybody, you know, shows how the auto industry is going up. Let's look at this plant. The rates are going down.
Now, our numbers in our industry start out higher. I know someone in the corner over there asked about what your normal injury rates are for an industry. They are down to ten. Maybe that is our baseline. I'm not really sure. But I am real happy with progress, not necessarily the total number. And I think that is something that is pretty impressive, an 80-percent drop in a few years. So we are pretty happy with that one.
The other one was Cleveland Engine Two was primarily a proactive process. And in that particular case, they had an opportunity to pretty much gut an entire engine plant and start over. They still had the four walls, but they had a lot of opportunities to fix it. And they are going to build a new engine called a Duratech V-6, which is a new class of engines used in the Taurus, Sable and the Contour. And they had pretty much total control over the new production systems.
They had a goal that was developed pretty early: develop a healthy, efficient and quality work method which provide the team members -- they didn't call their employees anymore -- team members with the proper tools to perform the job in an injury-free work environment. Interesting concept there.
The proactive approach. With the new facility, Cleveland Engine Two, CP2, developed and installed equipment with ergonomics as one of their prime considerations. Original equipment manufacturers were trained, just like PPG, trained in a two-day ergonomics course that we provided. And ergonomics check sheets, we have very simple check sheets, nothing fancy. It wasn't a 40-page check sheet, but it was about a 2-page check sheet that was really a reminder list. Some people call them a tickler list.
The idea is that they are reviewed at four different stages in the production development process. One is during the concept stage when the drawings are done. One is during design. Well, actually concept is earlier than the drawings. Concept is when you are just thinking what you really want to look like, howdo you want this plant designed.
One is during the design phase when you actually put the pencil to paper, one is during the run-off when the equipment is actually built, and finally at launch. And they still found some problems, but I think the interesting thing about it is a couple other areas.
Before equipment was designed and built, they identified 29 hourly employees that are skilled and production workers -- were picked, were trained in ergonomics and took the knowledge and their expertise and applied their simultaneous engineering. They were part of the team with engineers.
The V-6 engine, the local ergonomics committee was formed two-and-a-half years prior to job 1, and the team was trained and used their experience to use the paper and pencil approach. A lot of people get into high class computer systems. I have nothing against them. They are fine. But they just use a paper and pencil approach, just some quick check, because a lot of things are done very quickly. You don't have time to put together a huge simulation model or something like that. Although things are getting quicker in that now.
The results. In the first 18 months of production, they had, I think it was, one lost time injury. Actually no lost time injury. In the first two-and-a-half years they had like --I think they had three ergonomic injuries in a production plant that previously had, you know, ten per hundred per year.
An informed and educated work force. The team developed work methods described in a QOS fashion, quality operating system. The actual team designed their own work methods and focused on safety and ergonomics as a core element. So those were listed as part of the work methods. And the LECcontinues their regular review of components. That doesn't necessarily mean that people aren't getting injured. They are not recordable injuries, and they are putting them back on the job because they are fixing them so quickly. And I think you mentioned the idea of medical management and management of these injuries.
Well, the issue was it is a very interesting way for us to think.
Could you lower that one down, because this one --actually, that's pretty good.
This is -- now we get into the best practices, and this is the Eskimo rescue team. And what happened is their igloo fell over, and this guy has a flame thrower. And they are telling the guy to scream when they feel the heat. That's not a best practice, by the way. I just want to let everybody know that.
This is not a best practice either. This is two ways to stop a runaway stagecoach. One way is you hop on the horses like John Wayne used to do and stop it. The other way is you shoot the horses.
And I don't know. You pick your best practice. I guess this way may be unsafe, but this way you don't have any horses left. So either way.
This is a process -- now you have to brighten it back up. I love these video things. Keep that guy busy up there.
This is a process that we use at Ford to define our system. And I just want to explain it to you just for a few seconds, because it really is the core of what we are doing. This gets into our best practices core elements.
If you look at a system, and ergonomics is a system, It has a box around it.
What you have is a system here, and the system --inside this thing could be anything in the world. It could be building glass in a float line. It could be building a car. It could be a body shop in a plant. It could be anything. But the system has certain outputs, and those outputs have customers, and the customers have a need and a want.
And the other thing is the process has an output. It is called a voice of the process and a voice of the customer. And the point of this system is that we can look at the system very directly and find out what is going on, what works and what doesn't work. And that is what we are trying to do in ergonomics. Ergonomics is one of the core disciplines of health and safety, and we want to make it one of the core disciplines in the engineering system.
One of the things we want to look at is outcomes. And a lot of people focus their programs on outcomes, and I don't have a problem with that. But I think we sometimes focus too much initially on outcomes. Outcomes are things like people outcomes, employee up time, injury and illness statistics, workers' compensation, sickness and accidents, and so on.
And those are very good measures. I think that is a measurement of success. But as some of the other speakers talked about, there are other outcomes of these programs we should be concentrating on, like the manufacturing process, quality control and throughput and scrap rates. And sometimes these indicators are quicker to identify a problem than other indicators, like injury and illness. Injury and illness and trauma takes time. Then there is the product outcomes, like manufacture, building the product, assembly, feasibility and so on.
The other side of the coin is the process, the voice ofthe process. And the voice of the process are things like ISO. Everybody probably thinks they either love this word or hate this word, but ISO 9000, say as you do, do as you say, and prove it. And I think -- to be honest with you, I think it is a great system. I know it is a paper-intensive system and it's a lot of work, but it really forces you to think about what you are doing and how you want to do it. And we have had a lot of discussion with the last contract with the UAW about where we are going with this.
My feeling is this is how these systems should work. Let's say you have resources, a limited amount of resources, devoted to some initiative. Tom Albin this morning talked a little bit about the initiative of ergonomics. Should we have gone with the current process of health and safety, or should we have its own initiative called ergonomics, a focused initiative?
Well, Ford chose the same way, a focused initiative, as these two. And then as you design a system, as you design this system, you have a system development, you have a transition, and you have a stable system. And quite honestly, we spend a lot of time looking at outcomes initially when a system is being developed. My feeling is we should look at process more. We should pay a lot of attention to are we doing what we say we are going to do, because if we don't do that, your outcomes aren't going to happen.
So our feeling at Ford is that we want to look at the process itself, spend a lot of time on resources and focus looking at the process. And then as time goes on and the system becomes stable, we will look more and more at outcomes. And that is where we are. We are kind of crossing the threshold right now is where we think we are.
Now, don't hang me up on this. Is this line this way or curved this way? It doesn't really matter to me.
One of the ways we are measuring this is through a new process audit. We call it a process measurement tool, but it's an audit nonetheless. And we have an element in our health and safety system I will call element 21, which is ergonomics. Obviously there are 20 other elements in there.
And it has three sub-elements. One is developing global strategies, two is managing events, and three is prevention. And what we try to do now is develop stretch objectives --, every three years we are going to update this audit, and we are going to force our plants to get a little more involved, a little more stretched each time, push the envelope of where they are.
Right now with the old audit we had, they are all scoring 99 percent. Now they are scoring 50 percent, and the plants are going wild. What happened? Well, we are stretching you a little bit now. We are starting over from where we left off with the last audit.
That doesn't mean they are doing anything worse. It is just that we moved the target. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as they understand what that means, and leadership reacts appropriately.
So there are three elements: global strategy, managed events and prevention. What I want to do is just talk a little bit about these.
Our past audit was very output based rather than input based. We looked at a number of jobs that people fixed, reduction in CTDs in plants. And the current assessment is input based. Is there a written process? Are our actions effective? We really went to the ISO 9000 route, because that is the way we were going at Ford.
The ergonomic goals. Develop a measurement system that evaluates ergonomics process. We want to guide the facilities to the stretch objectives and document the global process. And that way, also, we have one document we are looking at globally. This document is used globally now, and the corporate ergonomics within our Ford production system.
I talked about the sub-elements within element 21. There are three, and these are the point totals. There are more points towards prevention and managing events than global strategies. There is a lot of debate. Should this be the highest? At this point, we said let's leave them equal to the managing events. We still have a lot of problems out there.
Let me give you some examples. Global strategies. There is a question that was asked in the audit: Is there a system for identifying and interpreting regulatory requirements that will impact ergonomics at the site? That is a question that is asked at the plant. And the plant goes "What do you mean?"
And we say, "Well, do you have a system in place? Do you have a system that when we send down information about regulations, you can't hide and say you never got it. Do you have a system to interpret that and look at it?"
And if the answer becomes a consistent no, that is a signal to corporate that we need to provide the system. If the answer is yes, the plants can do it on their own, and that is resources we don't need to spend at corporate. The plants have it handled. And that helps us define our next strategies. It has been really useful.
Another question asks “has a site development action plan to ensure that ergonomic goals and objectives are met.“ And we are not talking about these very high action plans like world peace and everything. We are talking about action plans that say: Can you measure it? And those are hard.
Managed events or managing events. An event is any job that exists on the plant floor. So this is our reactive process. Is there a systematic procedure, system procedure, to convey ergonomic concerns to the local ergonomic committee, which includes those three inputs.
Now some plants may feel that proactive risk analysis or assessments are more important than reviewing medical records. They have to have a good reason for it. That doesn't mean they are wrong. It just means that is their culture.
So we have -- we allow them that freedom, UAW/Ford, at a high level, but we just want to know why, and we want it done for the system. And that is a tough one. How do you do that? How do you prioritize? Boy, we have been spending some time on that one.
Managing events. By the way, the plants have come back to us on that one and said, "Could you come up with a scheme for us, because we are having trouble with it?"
Managing events. Are analytical tools used when conducting work site ergonomic analysis? And we kind of ask ourselves: What tools should we use? Should we come up with the toolbox, or should we come up with other -- or let them come up with their own? We decided to come up with a base toolbox and let other tools come into the system and we will review them. Some of the tools, as long as they are published, I think they are pretty good. But some of them are pretty hard to use.
The last one is prevention. Are ergonomic reviewsconducted by cross-functional teams? This is on new equipment. Specific ergonomic teams for new products. And that is a good question. It is like, well, how do you judge that? That is actually a professional judgment question. You can't really say: Show us exactly what you do.
Is there a system which ensures that ergonomic reviews take into account historical data, analytical tools and worker input? What we want to see is how do they do it. And these are just a couple of the questions. There are several others.
Another best practice I want to briefly mention is our ergonomic action guide. This, I think, is a new phase for us, and this gets us back down to the plant floor. This is a little lower level. And what we did -- I know you can't see this because of this video thing. But what we did was we gave --employee training (GRASP)couple years ago. We decided to retrain, I should say, approximately 100,000 hourly employees in our ergonomics process.
So we are this year and late last year starting to redo it through another program called guidelines, responsibilities and safe practices. Basically, it's a refresher training. And one of the things we launched during that process was in this action guide. In the action guide is a flowchart. And I think the neat thing about this flowchart is it tells the employee about how they need to get involved.
It was very difficult to contact 101,000 employees. I mean, I can be on the phone all day. So our differences were to really get down to the plant floor and let the plants tell them how to do it.
Give you some ideas. Basically it says we want the employee to look and listen to their job. We want them to ask isthere a problem with their job? Not necessarily is there a medical problem. Everybody goes: Oh, my gosh. Everybody is going to say there is a problem, and we will have all these issues to deal with. It didn't happen.
And then what are you going to do about it? Can you and your supervisor fix it or are you going to send it over to the local ergonomic committee to fix it? If you decide to go ahead and fix it, we want you to improve your job, use it and ask yourself is it better. And we want you to be involved in that process.
If you decide you are not going to be involved, you are going to send it over to the local ergonomic committee, one of the things you need to do is report it to them. The ergonomic committee will prioritize it, and then they will fix the job. And if they do decide to fix the job, you need to stay involved. And we tell them how they need to stay involved.
A lot of times some of our employees are saying: Well, I told the guy, and now I'm just waiting for a solution. They can't do that. They need to stay involved. They need to be involved in the entire process.
One way is they need to work with the LEC representatives during the evaluation of the job. They need to talk to the employee. We don't necessarily take the employees off the floor with a videotape; sometimes we do. But they may have a team go out to the floor and ask the employee right on the spot what's going on.
When they implement changes or when a design changes, they need to be involved with their ideas. Maybe they have the idea already. Maybe they have a great idea. Why reinvent something?
And then, once the change is in place, I think one ofour biggest problems is make sure you give it a fair try. Don't throw the thing out just because it wasn't totally your idea. We have had employees say, "Oh, I don't like it. I'm not going to use it." We could build a museum with articulating arms that aren't used out there. And I don't think that's right. That's resources that could have gone to other jobs. So we are really trying to work hard to get those people to try those things.
I think one of the greatest accomplishments of best practice we had in our process was the integration of ergonomics into our Ford production system. A lean, flexible, disciplined, common production system defined by a set a principles and processes that employs groups who are capable and empowered people. Those are empowering people learning and working safely together in the production and delivery of products.
The audit you just saw is part of the Ford production system now. They actually help audit our plants, which I think is one of our biggest accomplishments over the last couple of years.
The last thing is risk assessment. Ford production system demanded that we look at risk. How do you define it? We define risk as severity times occurrence equals risk. So the occurrence times the severity equals a risk.
And we wanted to look at risk in a couple ways. The assessment of the risk of the health on the operator. Can we look at tools to assess the risk? And we are starting to just begin to do this now on all of our jobs.
And then we look at the occurrence, the likelihood that a health effect will occur based on that exposure. Based on that, we are looking at a risk priority numbering system, and we are piloting one right now.
So jobs that have high priority will be getting more resources quicker than jobs that have low priority, because there is always competing priorities out there. There is not enough money all the time.
This gets into the issue of surveillance. I am sure you will hear a lot about surveillance. Somebody mentioned the issue of checklists and symptom surveys. We have found that not one of them is the best. There are some that are better than others. This risk priority is where we think we are going and it's not going to be a complicated formula.
I think one of the last things I just want to mention very quickly, to get information out into the field at Ford, we have an annual ergonomics co-chairs conference. We invite all of our local ergonomic committees co-chairs and two alternates once a year to, they love this place, Detroit. And we talk about issues for three days. One of the days is devoted entirely to breakouts with their divisions. The other two days are general session and a concurrent session like you see today.
And what we found is ergonomics really isn't a rocket science, we don't really need to be rocket scientists. It's time we really face reality. I have heard enough of this. We can proceed with ergonomics programs with the information we have.
I think we have proven it. You saw two cases here. You saw a third case with myself. I think you are going to see about four or five other cases today, if you just go to any of the general sessions. It works. It helps your production systems. It helps your competitive advantage. And more importantly, it helps the employee.
