NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Brian Peacock, General Motors
DR. PEACOCK: This may seem to be a bit of a surprise to you, but I feel that the health and safety industry has tried to redefine my profession. I learned about ergonomics back in the 60's, and I thought it was a little broader than industry has tried to define it. Because, of course, people have minds and souls as well as bodies, I think we must not lose sight of that fact. You cannot just look at a back or a wrist. It doesn't make sense. You got to look at their minds and motivations as well.
Now, over recent years, maybe over the last 50 years, ergonomics has had various highlights that have attracted a lot of attention. Scientific management was one. Around the time of the Second World War, there were issues of complex military and transportation systems, and that activity has continued. Process safety has attracted a lot of attention recently. Someone this morning said ergonomics never killed anybody, but maybe they didn't go to Chinoble. My suspicion is that that was an ergonomics problem.
Consumer product evaluation has given a lot of impetus to ergonomics. Ralph Nader drew attention to that in the 60's. Recently, over the last 10 years, computer interface design has been a major source of interest, particularly in cognitive ergonomics. But most of you are familiar with cumulative disorders and the activities of OSHA and NIOSH, maybe over the last 10 years, in drawing attention to the physical aspects of ergonomics. That is why most of you are here, but I'm trying to point out that this is just one thing in the line of major events that have attracted attention to ergonomics.
I am going to address various aspects of ergonomics: Why we do ergonomics, when do we do it, what are the opportunities in the design process. Then I'm going to talk a little about what we do, who does it and how we do it. Finally, I'm going to draw attention to some of the perhaps more political issues of how much and how many and accommodation decisions; who do we design for?
I view ergonomics as having this kind of categorization. There are physical, informational and macro aspects of ergonomics. We can pay attention to consumer products and services where the eventual customer has a choice to buy a product or not buy a product. The other part of ergonomics has to do with industrial and service occupations where the eventual customer, usually the line worker, doesn't have too much choice with regard to the design of his equipment and environment.
When we talk about consumer products and services, we consider comfort and convenience. In the informational aspects, we talk about performance and human error. In the macro aspects, we apply ergonomics to the business of marketing and we also apply it to the issue of products liability. In industrial and service occupations, physical ergonomics has mainly to do with health enhancement or musculoskeletal disorders. In the informational ergonomics, we deal with safety and product quality because these are mainly cognitive problems.
At the macro level, we deal with how do we motivate people to do inherently boring or unstimulating jobs? Also at the macro level, we use ergonomics to deal with cost avoidance and cost reduction.
In the physical area, we tend to use comfort surveys or illness and injury methods. In the informational ergonomics, we talk about transaction times. How long does it take to choose the right program on your radio in the car or just your air conditioner? At the macro level, we deal with sales. Does ergonomics sell more cars? In the industrial and service occupations, we deal with injury and illness rates. In the informational area, we talk about quality audits and accident rates. And at the macro level, we deal with attendance, turnover, and the cost of ergonomics as compared to the cost of not doing ergonomics.
At General Motors, in the physical area, we deal with occupant packaging, whether you can reach the pedals, or not, or whether you can see where you're going and seat comfort. In the information area, we deal with stop lights, heads up displays, control design, those kind of things. We also deal a lot with warnings. The textbook "Automotive Ergonomics" deals with this subject area. It was published by Taylor and Francis in 1993.
However, most of us here are interested in reactive and proactive ergonomics programs which deal with physical ergonomics in the workplace. I think there are many opportunities, and I'm going to spend more time on that subject. There are many opportunities of the application, particularly of cognitive ergonomics in the areas of process safety and product quality with particular regard to warranty costs.
Again, opportunities of the macro level with the safety and health environment of the firm and the definition of what is a fair day's work and what is job enrichment? How do we stimulate people in inherently unstimulating jobs?
Very briefly, this is a description of the reactive General Motors or joint UAW-GM-OSHA Program on manufacturing ergonomics. It's very similar to many of the programs that you are familiar with. It deals with ergonomics committees and monitors, practical ergonomics training. We deal with a risk factor checklist which came out of the University of Michigan in the mid-80's. We use symptoms questionnaires. We use job analysis and hazard abatement. Finally, we deal with medical management and record and reporting.
Many of you who are very familiar with those kind of programs. This was a massive program over six years.
In parallel with this program has been the development of the General Motors pro-active manufacturing ergonomics process. In 1990, I was asked to develop a manufacturing ergonomics lab which involved the development of the physical facilities and staff. There was also divisional ergonomics staff development. Most of what we do is transfer ergonomics technology from the literature into useful ergonomics tools and techniques.
We do laboratory and field project work. We do analysis tool and guideline development, you saw some of those kind of checklists this morning. A lot of what we do is ergonomics process development. We believe training is the strongest thing we do, because eventually, ergonomists don't do ergonomics. Engineers do. It's got to be into the engineering process. We also work with computer aided ergonomics.
This is the beginning of my discussion of the process of ergonomics. The first opportunity, of course, is to design the hardware and the software. That is, if you can design a car to put itself together, then you've solved the problem. And so, for example, it would be nice to have a battery that weighed two pounds. But sometimes you can't design the hardware to solve the problem. So then you've got to deal with a processing intervention, so you might be designing an assist.
If you can't design the assist, then you've got to deal with a production solution which usually means how many people does it take to put a battery in a car? Finally, if you can't solve it at the production level, you've got to deal with the personnel system design which is population and individual assignment, training and surveillance.
This is a classical description of how you all learned in Ergonomics 101 about how you design systems and processes. This doesn't work. Ergonomists don't own the process, engineers do. It is our job to infiltrate the engineering process or the company's process in design.
At the product design level, we like to influence the design of components and where things are in the vehicle. Fasteners are also very important, and Rob is going to talk to some extent about this issue.
At the process level, we talk about assists, tools, containers, and the design of workstations. At the production level -- this is close to when we're going to have the manufacturing system up and running, we talk about line balance and physical balance using the kind of checklist that you saw this morning. And then finally, we talk about team structure, rotations, the placement of appropriate people on appropriate jobs.
For example, an engineer might ask me, "How heavy should this box be?" And I will say, "It all depends on what you're going to do with it." But he doesn't want to know what you're going to do with it. He wants to know what should be the weight of this box or how high should this thing be. He does not want to hear, "It all depends".
In General Motors, we've set up a semi-quantitative scale where we produce a set of number on a zero, one, two, three scale. But we give hard numbers to our engineers. A number that is associated with a zero is unlikely to cause any problem. It might be two pounds or something like that. A number that's associated with a "one" has a possible interaction with other factors. Number two has probable interaction with other factors. And a "three" should only be exceeded with good cause. We never say never.
This is our mapping statement philosophy. Along the bottom we give either simple or complex engineering quantities. We must give engineers numbers, and we link that to our rating system.
Some GM examples. For example, we have a thing called a risk factor checklist, a wall work sheet, production analysis tool that we use. These are all quantitative analysis tools, but the engineers want to know 75 newtons for push force or 45 pounds or, "everything has to be in this box" which is a defined reached curves. The policies that are offered by management is that there should be no three's on the job. That is a policy decision. It is not an engineering decision.
We support all of this activity by training. For example, in General Motors, I think more than 10,000 people have been trained, at least the one hour level. At the one day level, more than 5,000 people have been trained. At the one week level, over 1,000 have been trained. Finally, at the one month level, more than 40 have been trained, and we have got at least 10 people who have had much more than the one year level of professional training.
This has more to do with the policy issues of our manufacturing process. It's the "how much" decision. I'm going to discuss issues of production with protection, which population are we aiming at, such as people who work in electric motive division of General Motors here in LaGrange.
If we went to a protectionist type philosophy where the job demands were much less than the population capabilities, everybody would be able to do every job, and that would be totally non-competitive. It is not possible. However, if we go to selectionism, if we're in the NFL, then there are very few can do that job. But in the long run, in industry, this is a very short-sighted view of the world. So our decisions about where do we draw the line in the sand is somewhere between protectionism an selectionism, which is, of course, production with protection. Now, the other problem is which population are we talking about? We have certain surrogates. We have anthropometric data from certain populations. We have strength data. Bill, you've produced industrial strength data. The average age of General Motors assembly workers is in the upper 40's. Are we talking about handicapped workers? Are we talking about professional athletes? We have to be more specific about the population that we're describing, otherwise, our numbers don't make sense.
These are just some examples of the kind of questions that are related to those decisions. How much head room should there be in the rear seat of a sports car? Do we accommodate the 95 percent head room or leg room? How heavy should a box be? Should we restrict the weight of suitcases to 10 pounds?
What does "some assembly required" mean? How much are you willing to spend for a vehicle safety feature? These are all factors that affect the policy decisions that we as ergonomist have to advise on.
Most of you have seen Barbara Silverstein's paper on incidents which is the upper part of this picture. The problems with incidents, that is, the high force, high exposure problems create great incidents. Low force and high exposure which is the CTD problem. And, of course, accidents may occur with high force and low exposure.
One of the problems that we face in incident counts is that they are very sensitive to recording policies and thresholds. We feel that it is more important to look at severity measures such as lost days and dollars and particularly be sensitive to the effects of other factors.
Unfortunately, ergonomist are sort of political football in the middle of all of this activity. We talk about voice of the customers. We have employers and workers, and we talk about participation. Really, "voice of the customer" and "participation" are equivalent things. We have the government (OSHA and NIOSH) trying to help us. We have the lawyers and the medics trying to help us and we also have academia. Consultants are certainly trying to help us as also are the trade associations. The unions are in on the act, and the consumer advocates are not far behind.
In the end, we are just in the middle of all of this mess trying to take advice from everybody. And what we're trying to do is get some ergonomics balance. Thank you very much.
