NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Dan Cimmino, Newport News Shipbuilding
MR. ZIEGFRIED: Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Dan Cimmino. He is a 1986 graduate from Connecticut State University and has a Bachelor of Science degree in manufacturing engineering technology. He has studied ergonomics with the University of Michigan, Biomechanics Corporation of America, the Joyce Institute and the Ergonomic Technologies Corporation. His experience in manufacturing engineering includes planning of machine parts, numerical control planning, programming, bonding assemblies, composite parts, hydraulic systems and special tooling.
In 1991, he designed and implemented an ergonomics program for one of the country's largest aircraft manufacturers. The program was extremely successful and since then, other companies have adopted similar programs. Dan served as Chairman of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences Collaborative Project on improvement of hand tools. Project participants included Ford, General Motors, Chryslers, Lockheed, Ingersoll Rand and the United Technologies.
Dan is currently employed as Corporate Ergonomist at Newport News Shipbuilding where he has designed and implemented a successful ergonomics program. He is also a member of the Virginia Center for Orthopedic Research. Dan Cimmino.
Thank you, Karl. I'd just like to add one thing about Karl's presentation. I had the privilege of visiting Karl up at Bath Iron Works and got to see his work up there first-hand. And I could assure you his changes are very effective and very widespread. Also, the people aspect of it is very important, and it was very evident and that everywhere we went, everybody had a smile on their face and was saying hi to Karl. And it really showed that the work he did was very much appreciated. Lights, please.
I'm going to talk about ergonomics at Newport News Shipbuilding, and basically, we're going to tell you a little bit about Newport News Shipbuilding, review some of the challenges and particularly the maritime industry having to do with ergonomics, go over the structure of the program and then show some of the methods of the implementations, the modifications we've made and then review the results.
Newport News Shipbuilding is a participant in OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program at the star level which is the highest level where VPP is the largest participant at about 18,000 employees, and we're the only shipyard in the program. And that's something we're all very proud of. We're also America's largest privately owned shipyard. We're now independent of TENNECO. We are our own corporation traded on the stock exchange. This is a picture of the yard. It stretches about two miles along the James River and is about 550 acres.
These are two of our products, the carrier Kennedy and the submarine Houston. In addition to these, we've designed, built, overhauled, repaired tug boats, the yachts, cruise ships and tankers.
Getting at the ergonomics, in the maritime industry, there are some unique challenges that are different than other industries as I eluded to before. It's not an assembly line. They're long product design lead times. Some of our products we're building were designed 25 years ago. And as you all know, many times the design drives the process design. So it leaves you with limited opportunities to change the process because the design defines the manufacturing process.
In addition, shipbuilding is a very hazardous industry to begin with. Aside from ergonomics, I'm sure you've all been to shipyards. If you haven't everything there is heavy. Everything there is a lot of times dirty. It's a harsh environment with conventional safety and industrial hygiene aspects also. So it presents some unique challenges. But these would be components of any ergonomics program anywhere.
And I'd like to point out, it's not an exhaustive list, but I think it's a core list, for example, medical management. That would be it's own presentation. But these would be essential elements, and I'll hit on them one at a time.
The first one I'll talk about is program leadership. There should be one person in charge, and that's absolutely crucial. A lot of times when a company wants to have a new program or a new process, they send everybody to training. And the premise behind training or education is when you get back from the training, you're supposed to do something different than you used to or something in addition to what you used to. And unless there's somebody in charge pushing the program, everybody's going to come back and just look at each other and do what they used to do all the time anyway. You need to have somebody in charge to keep it fresh, to keep the projects on the front burner. They could come from a lot of different departments. I'm kind of prejudiced to manufacturing engineering, because I spent a lot of time in manufacturing engineering. That's an excellent department, because manufacturing engineers are very familiar with product design and the process design. But any of these departments are good candidates. It's important to have a written plan. After the plan is written, it's important to communicate that plan.
In addition to that, management commitment is essential. And you need real management commitment, not the kind and the speeches and the posters, because that commitment is free. Everybody gets that, but real management commitment to devote resources, peoples' time, money to solving the problems. And judging by the size of the ergonomic problems in the shipbuilding industry based on lost time injuries, workers' compensation costs and just plain hurting people. It shouldn't be hard to gain management commitment.
Education I think is the key to success in an ergonomics program. And I think everybody needs some level of education. Every employee of Newport News Shipbuilding has received some education. Management is critical in educating the management, and some of this is just to understand what an ergonomic disorder is. Because a lot of times they're difficult to understand. You don't see any blood. You don't see any missing fingers or arms. And all you have is somebody complaining about pain.
And they may be very effective at shipbuilding and fitting and pipe fitting, what not. But maybe they're not doctors. Maybe they're not ergonomist. So some education to understand the nature of these disorders will help them understand that they are real and they are controllable. In addition, as I said, the employee population needs some form of training, and the purpose of that is to understand what ergonomics is, what the risk factors are and who to go to if they think they have a problem -- very, very important.
We have a lot of different avenues to train. This is one of them. This is a photo of a --- this is my buddy, James Ward, Ginger Strictland. Some people in the audience are here also. But we have a lot of different avenues to train. This is a voluntary night school. I believe it's 12 classes long, four hours per class. We have a health and safety task team which we'll talk about in a minute. These teams meet -- most of them meet weekly. We have a take home course that people can take home and study all different aspects of safety.
In addition to ergonomics, there's industrial hygiene fire protection machine guarding, all sorts of things. We have a program at our clinic. When somebody goes in with a back injury, they don't leave the clinic until they see a video on back ergonomics and wrist ergonomics and so on. It's a little bit reactive, but it is effective.
These are other methods of training, some internal publications. We have monthly safety bulletins that come out. We have a company newspaper that comes out monthly. We have special, what we call spotlight news, that come out periodically when there's a subject of interest. So any avenue that we could use to educate the people, we try to exploit.
Employee Involvement: As it's been said probably a couple dozen times today is absolutely critical. And there's some reasons for that, and they go well beyond the PR and good will in trying to keep them informed. It's more of a team work approach making them part of the decision-making process. Why? Well, they know the job better than anywhere else. As a manufacturing engineer I am well aware that in any process, there are two separate processes. And one is the process that the engineer envisioned or designed. Then there's the actual process on the floor. And the people on the floor really know that process inside out.
The other thing is they, a lot of times have good suggestions if anyone bothers to ask them. If they think their role is merely following orders, well, they're going to follow orders even if they know there's a better way to do the job and it's not in the best interest of the company. Ask them for good ideas, and believe me, you'll get ideas.
And the job modifications are much more likely to succeed if you get their input. Because they're more likely to accept and approve on the modifications rather than pick on them and try to make them not work, which happens if you try to force them into it, it's not going to work. Make them part of the process, it will work.
This is how a lot --- it says, you weren't listening. I said, don't fall. That's not employee involvement. This is how a lot of safety programs run. It's not a good way to run a safety program. It's an even worse way to run an ergonomics program. As I said, we have a lot -- we have a 42 health and safety task teams. They run about 15 members each, and they -- most of them meet weekly. The majority of the members are hourly employees, and many of the teams are led by hourly employees. In my opinion, they should all be led hourly employees, and there's a reason for that.
If you think about it, the supervisor or the foreman, he's in charge of the department anyway. So if you have a health and safety task team or an ergonomics program, that program's about change. And if you put the person who's in charge, in charge of that team, well, he's already in charge. You're not going to get new ideas. If you put an hourly person in charge, you're more likely to get new ideas, better ideas.
In addition, if you look at the objectives which is to hurt less people, there are different reasons for that to be an objective. And a lot of times, the management aspect of that is well, we want to save money. We don't want to hurt people, but what you hear more often than not, is saving money, increasing productivity, et cetera. But in my opinion, the hourly employees have a lot more at stake, because it's their own health and well-being.
And I think if you ask yourself what's more important, are we going to meet the quarterly targets for injury or am I going to lose the use of my right arm? I think most people are going to side with the health and safety of their own body. So I think they really have more of a vested interest.
This is one of our task teams. This is the electrical task team. Janice Parker and Melanie Harris are leaders of this team, do a fantastic job. And this is our President, Bill Fricks. We have recognition programs. They won the President's Award last year for outstanding work. I don't like to leave anybody out, so I wanted to go through the rest of the task teams and show them to you. I bet I had a couple of you nervous. But we are proud of all of our task teams, and they really do a fantastic job.
And they have responsibilities. As I said, it's not just PR. They have a lot of responsibilities. They perform inspections of areas. They perform accident investigations, job safety analysis, and they're responsible for coming up with and sometimes implementing job modifications. And as I said, it's serious work. And a lot of times when they're a member of the team, they don't understand it's serious work. And a lot of people, such as myself, will come in and educate them to get them up to speed, what to look for, what to do.
And when you teach ergonomics, a lot of times, I'll give a textbook type example of a before and after, how to fix it. And somebody will say, whoa, you can't fix these problems. I'll ask for an example, what are some problems out there? They say, oh, there's no way you could fix that problem. And I love hearing that, because I have a simple answer to that. I said, "Well, I'm not going to fix it. You are." I said, "You're not here for no reason. You're here because we need you. We need you to help us fix these problems. If we didn't need you, you wouldn't be here at all."
And just about every time I hear that, that particular problem that that particular individual complained about ends up coming up with a fantastic idea to solve the problem. That happened a lot of different times.
As far as the implementation, I advocate what I like to call low-tech ergonomics which is a common sense approach. Which is when you find a problem, spend less time measuring it and more time fixing it. I'm an engineer. I love high-tech toys. I love computers, all those sorts of things, but sometimes we might get carried away with the analysis. If I see an operation, and I see a guy in an extended risk posture applying a lot of force, I know enough to say, "That's not good, and we have to fix that."
If I buy a bunch of fancy toys, and I find out that it's extended 38.7 degrees and there's 42 pounds of force, it still leads to the same place. I have to fix that job, and there was a problem. So my evaluations are very simple. And what I say, if you can do these four things, your job evaluations are complete enough. And that is to quantify the risks, to highlight the problems, to prioritize and justify workplace modifications. So if you could do these four things, it's an effective evaluation.
I'd like to run through a few case studies of some things that we've done and before and after in most cases. This is an example of -- this is an empty spool, but when this spool is full, it's Mr. Lynch is carrying 35 pounds the way this was. And what this is an automatic welding machine. And as you can see, it has to be loaded over his head which is not good. So a simple fix will lower where you install it. Right. Elbow height is the best height. Again, it's not high-tech but very effective.
I'll tell you a funny story. When I went to the walk-through and I identified this, they modified the machine. And it was about chest height, shoulder height. So being the good guy that I am, I said, "That's a real good job you guys did." I mean, it's much better, because it did lower the risk. However, I kind of told the guy I was with, "You know, it would be better if it was elbow height." And he says, "Hey, you know, you messed it up anyway." But if you go through the shop now, you'll see every one of them at elbow height, not high-tech but very effective.
This is another larger automated welding machine. I mean, you only see about a quarter of the machine here. But the before picture is what you see in yellow, and the after is in orange. And the operation here was the same thing, to load the spool of weld wire on a machine. These spools weigh about 70 pounds. And previously, there was a vertical ladder that the guy had to hold the spool and climb up the vertical ladder. Then when he got to the top -- you see Mr. Kirkland here.
There was a bar where this chain is now, and he'd have to extend over to -- and reach over the bar and bend over to install it. Not very good. So what we did is, obviously, we installed the staircase. So he climbs up the stairs rather than carry it up the vertical ladder. And then we extended the platform so he could belly right up to the work and install it a better posture. Again, not high-tech but very effective.
This is an example of wire feeders that we use. They weight about 66 pounds. The spools weigh about 35 pounds. Carrying them around in the ship units is cumbersome. It's hazardous in addition to the risks of injuries. It tires people out, fatigue, et cetera. So what we're starting to do is get these Gantry units.
This is a Gantry crane that carries nothing but the wire feed units. You can't see it very clearly, but it eliminates the lifting completely. If a bigger unit is under there, they could work on the top part of the unit. Workers are less fatigued. There's also less to trip over. There's less stuff on the deck that people could trip over, reducing a tripping hazard.
This is similar to Karl's. I shared his hate of dogs, and these dogs are used on the acorn table, the welding table, the same as him, to hold these covers. And this is a straightening operation to flatten out these covers so they'd be water tight. And the right way the process is they bang these dogs in place with this big hammer. Then they heat it up with a torch, and then they bang it again with a big hammer until it's straight.
And one little test I like to do when I look at these processes is to look at the process, then look at the calendar. And I say, okay. Well, the calendar says 1997. How old is this process? All right. And if the answer is not at least in the '90's, I say, well, there's probably some room for improvement there.
And what Mr. Cutler came up with was an idea for a straightener table. And this rolls back and forth both in this axis and this axis, and there's a hydraulic ram to use as straightening. So it eliminates a lot of stress on the operator. You get a much higher productivity, and you end up with higher quality products. Right. Very important.
This is another one. We had these chain links that are welded to I-beam sections. And I was teaching class, and I was mentioning how rotation of the form isn't good. It leads to tennis elbow. And this guy, Mr. Galloway, said, "Well, I do that all day." And someone popped up and said, "See, that's a problem you can't fix. You have to do that." I said, "Really, let's go take a look at it." And after looking at the job, what he's doing is grinding the welds down on either side of the chain.
And when these jobs come in -- he's doing this for months at a time. After looking at the job, looking at the blueprints and consulting with engineering and quality, it turned out that the grinding was totally unnecessary. So by eliminating that process, we significantly improved the productivity, reduced the flow time obviously and proved the product quality because we reduced the risk of over grinding and eliminated the wear and tear on the individual. Like I said, not high-tech but very effective.
This is welding booth application where we started to play with counter-balances. Some of our restricted duty workers work in booths. And what we did is we installed counter-balances to accept the weight of the welding torch. We still have to work on this little bit. As you've heard a lot of times before, ergonomic implementation isn't usually a one time fix. Usually, it takes a couple of iterations to get it just right. What we have to work on here is the harness that holds the torch.
I'll caution you when you use these, because they'll fix one problem and cause another as a lot of ergonomic problems do. And as you know, what a counter-balance is designed to do is accept the weight of the tool. So if you let go of the tool, that tool will be hanging in space wherever you left it. And, therefore, is a hazard because the guy could bump into it.
But what this guy did, on his own initiative, is he manufactured his own holder for the welding torch. So when he's not using it, that goes in the holder, eliminating the hazard, which I think is a very good example of the value of education to the employees, giving them ownership of the process and empowering him to make the changes he needs. Excellent work. I can't see enough of that.
And these are three of the guys who worked on that project, Mr. Sherman and Mr. Moody, Mr. Baker. And if you noticed, in every slide, I try to mention some of the people in there. And the reason is simple. The people is where it's at, and if you don't have the people involved in the ergonomic process, there's a lot of room for improvement. And you're not getting the most out of your program.
This is a fancy chair, and one of the guys in our shipyard named it the "Super Bucket." We have a lot of floor work, and if you're like our shipyard, you have a lot of guys sitting on a five gallon buckets. This chair, you sit on. It looks like it's backwards. This is spring loaded, and there's a padded piece in the chest. It's not a perfect posture to work in, but we have jobs where people do floor level work for months at a time. And where we've used this chair, we have had a guy who said when he takes a break, it will take him five minutes just to stand up straight.
It takes him that long just to loosen up again. With this chair, he gets right up. So it's been real effective. This is just a mock up, just to show how it's used. It could also be used in different configurations as a conventional chair. You could sit it in it sideways, real important to mix up the posture, and that chair facilitates it. I mean, you could even lay down on the chair and have that on your chest occasionally.
This is a change that we implemented when we had a new crane. Most of our cranes, you have to climb a vertical ladder to get to. This one, we installed stairs. Easier to get up and down to. If somebody -- a restricted worker has a problem with his knee, no vertical ladder. There's no problem, because we have stairs. In addition, it gets hot in the summer. The operator could bring his cooler up with him so he could have Gatorade or whatever on hot days. Little things add up. Little changes make big differences.
In addition, we reconfigured the crane controls. I don't have a before picture for you, but as you can see, these is where the controls were cut off. Previously, he couldn't see what he was doing. He had to twist himself up like a pretzel just to see what he was doing, putting him at risk to an ergonomic injury to his neck and back and increasing the likelihood of an incident with the crane itself.
But we modified it. We moved the chair back so it's a sit/stand workstation. We have the controls where he could use them comfortably, and he could also see what he's doing. This is Mr. Parker. He was real happy after we changed that for him.
This is an example of a typical unit, and some of the things we're trying to do. After identifying problems -- one of the problems, this guy up here is working on top of the unit on his hands and knees. And he's probably working the whole shift on his hands and knees. And down below, you have guys working over head, and more than likely, he's working the whole shift over head.
Neither are real good postures to work in, but if he switches with this guy at lunch time, you reduce your exposure to each of the postures by 50 percent which is an idea we're trying to implement. The workers are very receptive to that idea.
This is a picture of our maintenance department task team. This is Mr. Hugh Byrd, a buddy of mine. And they had a problem with back injuries in their area, and they decided to make a training course so they can train their department in back injuries. And with my help and the help of other people in the department, we helped them make their own training class. I have overhead slides that show back anatomy and this illustrates why we should keep the loads close.
They didn't like the overhead slides. They wanted big posters. So we got a pile of big posters on poster board for them as part of their training. And they went, and they trained 350 people in their department. And the results of that were really fantastic.
These are months, and as you can see, there's about one every month, lost time back injury. And this yellow line represents when we had the training. And in the 16 months following the training, we haven't had one lost time back injury. Very effective. Even more effective when it's not a safety guy or management guy explaining the back safety to him. It's one of the guys he works with every day explaining it to him. Much more effective. We had the same type of program with our welding, health and safety task team.
We have Mr. Minge here, Pete Nill. Great guys. And they developed -- they had a problem with wrist injuries. When we went from stick welding to wire feed welding, we started to have a lot more wrist injuries, because of a lot less task variety, a lot more static postures. So we did the same type of thing. And what we did was we supply them with training materials. And each member of the team, of which there's 14 members, they received the viewgraph slides.
And, then, in addition, they got the notes pages, with a picture of the viewgraph slides and the important notes. Because a lot of these guys -- I speak in front of people all the time. Some of these guys have never spoken in front of a large group before. They're a little bit intimidated. So they have notes to go by, what to point out for each slide and also a video tape explaining wrist anatomy.
The results we had from that program, not quite as effective. These are the lost time wrist injuries before, ergonomic wrist injuries before. This is the training. Not perfect results, but you can see a significant drop in the number of wrist injuries. And just keep in mind that this is education alone. This is education all by itself, teaching him how to be effective and use his own tools properly.
This is a slide. If you're like any other company, you have manufacturing employees, but you also have office employees which is a source of a lot of trouble. We have an office ergonomics program. It's also been very effective. The results of all this together over the past two years have been very good.
And this is a chart of our lost time injuries, and this is a rate over the last two years. And as you could see, we have it down very significantly. We still have lots of work to do, but the results so far have been very good.
So the conclusion, obviously implementing ergonomics in the maritime industry is an effective way to control musculoskeletal disorders. That concludes my presentation.
This is a picture of the Birmingham during a breaching maneuver.
