NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Question and Answer Session
DR. RODGERS: We have about seven to eight minutes for questions before we close. Any questions you would like to ask or any comments?
Q: Rich Rebar from Smith Kline Beecham. One comment and one question. My comment was, on Mark's slides he had one of the "patients" that all that stuff was done based on the functional job analysis. And that paper smoths over and it really does explain everything that you guys were talking about.
DR. RODGERS: I didn't plant him. It is available literature, though.
Q: We have translated it into Spanish, also, if anyone wanted that.
The question was, I noticed, Paula, in your work you used a lot of photographs. Did you use videotaping, too?
DR. BOHR: Some of the teams did use videotaping, but not all of them. The problem with the videotaping is being able to get the three-dimensional aspect. They felt they could capture it better in still photographs. They particular used the instant photographs where they can write on the bottom of the photographs to be able to track or to make notes. They also carry markers with them so they can mark angles or twists or that type of thing on the photographs. But they do use both.
Q: Is that that other photograph company.
DR. BOHR: Yes, that is that other photograph company.
DR. RODGERS: Yes, the one in Boston, I believe.
Anybody else who wants to ask a question?
Q: Mike Halter with M&M Protection Consultants. My question is directed to Mark.
When you sent that E-mail questionnaire, what sort of percent of response did you have? Or if you don't have that number, what was the sheer volume of response? My fear of doing that within my own company is getting 10,000 people wanting workstations assessed.
MR. JOHNSON: I don't know what his total response was, but he just did it for the one little division he was in. So he probably didn't have more than about 200 people that he was collecting from. But the point you have made is a very good one.
The biggest problem that we have had is once we start talking to people -- I will use office ergonomics as an example -- typically we go into a department and we try to talk management into instead of having us look at one person's workplace, let's do an awareness session for like an hour or 45 minutes at one of the staff meetings. We usually end up with somewhere around 10 to 20 percent of those people walking out and making appointments for somebody to come in and take a look at them.
I had a discussion a couple months ago with our senior vice president. In fact, our company CEO said we need to be doing more in office ergonomics. They said, "We want you to go out and give these large group presentations."
I said, "Well, if I get 500 to 600 people in an auditorium and I get a 20-percent hit rate, I have 4 people trying to service the world." You can figure a half-hour to an hour per visit. It doesn't add up.
What we have to break it down into the lowest common denominator. And we have done a lot of training of people in each organization. Much like Paul talked about at the hospital, train the people in that organization to do it and then coach them into doing it. Then they become self-sufficient.
DR. RODGERS: Also, the other thing you teach them, is that most of it they can do, and then they know when they need to call you in.
Any other questions?
Q: My name is Brian Sherman. I am with Prince Corporation out of Holland.
This is for Mr. Day. On your worksite analysis protocol you identified risk factors like time to endurance, force, repetition, that type of thing. I notice you didn't mention postures or awkward postures, and I know that plays a major role and biomechanically speaking time to endurance. If you can just reiterate and discuss how that affects your psychophysical measurement.
MR. DAY: Posture actually is involved in the force or the percent of effort category. What you do is you take a look at the change in the posture, and the change will increase or decrease the force. So that is involved in that and it has that biomechanical overlay already.
DR. RODGERS: I wanted to pick that up from the other discussions, too. The effort level is where all the typical biomechanical risk factors comes in, in determining that effort level. But as Don says, we express it as a percent of capacity in that posture. I don't think posture is separate from effort. What determines the level of effort is what posture you are in.
So Mark, I think, has put up the form. This is in the publication, too. I'm not trying to sell this to you, just letting you know it is out there if you want to try it and it is easy to use. All we have done is describe postures that would be light, moderate, heavy.
The main thing you have to be sure of is in building in the endurance factor in the rating of effort, because that's what happens, if it's fatiguing. And then I say, "Well, what makes it heavy?" Well, because we do it all day. Then you know you are integrating the other factors. So that's how we say for just three seconds if you did it and you didn't do it again for five minutes, how heavy would it be. Then they get back into the real effort rating. But all of those risk factors we use in the other systems are really basically describing the posture and the situation. And now we can relate it to percent of capacity in that posture.
Q : My concern with that is you are involving employees on the floor that may not be aware of that relationship.
DR. RODGERS: You know what is fascinating, that they don't have any problem with the level of effort. The one that they can measure is the one they don't do as well on, and that is understanding that the time and the frequency is related to the level of effort, to the heavy effort. They want to do it for the whole cycle.
And I say, "Wait a minute. How long is it heavy?" It is only heavy when you do the final force, like putting on the coil back there. It is only heavy on the hand when you are actually driving that thing home. So that is the timing you have to use. It is a matter of getting them to be able to see this. And I'll tell you, once they have seen it, they do it better than I do. They are so much better because they understand that job.
MR. DAY: That has been my experience, too, Bob.
DR. RODGERS: Thank you.
Yes.
Q: I am Colleen Burnett, and I'm an occupational therapist. I am at a hospital and dabble enough in the industries to be very dangerous. So I am wondering what are some more reference points? In particular, the work set analysis from yourself to have more of the equations I am interested in.
Q : The references are included in the handouts, and that will be in the overall syllabus that everybody is putting together.
Q: Okay.
DR. RODGERS: And the RULA method, for instance, that Mark referred to that has been published again, too, is a nice method, used originally in Sweden, I think.
DR. BOHR: If I can comment on that also. What we have found in health care is that the workers have, by comparison with other groups I have worked with, the workers have a better understanding of what health risks are. So they are able to identify without using -- and I am not downplaying the formulas, because I find them very useful. But they are identifying the problems more innately and being able to target exactly what the basis of that problem is without having to do the calculations.
The calculations to me are my security of being able to document that, but they have been able in health care to zero in on those issues and identify them very quickly. And their outcomes, again, were not different than what I would have arrived at spending all of the time doing the calculations.
MR. JACOB: We use a standard checklist, I guess, in our techniques for job evaluations. We use some canned ones that we have used. We have done some redesign of those, but it is a numerical sort of checklist of the number of repetitions that people are doing. And when we go and modify the job, we will go back and look at those again. Hopefully it is going down and that would be the direction we want to go.
Q: I am John Legenberger with Wal-Mart Stores. Has anyone on the panel done anything with handholds on boxes.
DR. RODGERS: The reference that I would give you first is look at Colin Drury and Joe Deeb's work, which was done under a NIOSH grant and was published about 1984, '85, somewhere in that range. And I think one is in Applied Ergonomics and then there is some in the Ergonomics Journal, too.
I make one comment about this, because having done a lot of work in warehouses and distribution centers, the thing that struck me is the great idea of telling people where to put their hands just goes to hell in a hand basket as soon as you get out in the real world. So the real question, I think, is do they have to have handholds because they are lifting them or are there other ways you can help them direct the package as you see in Fed Ex and UPS and some of the other places, where you can direct the package without actually having to pick it up.
Because of the heights of shelves, because of the locations you are trying to put these things sometimes, what you will find is that what is the best handhold for the low stuff just doesn't work for the high stuff. I can just say from my own experience, it is a long time of trying to solve that problem, too.
The only place I really saw a handhold make a huge difference was in a large product which happened to be lithoplates at Kodak Colorado where you couldn't handle it unless you had a handhold. The handhold was actually part of the packaging design so we worked with the package engineers to put it in so that we could handle that product. I think trying to find the optimal handhold is a good idea, but I don't think it is going to work in the real world as far as putting them in direct packaging.
Did you have some experience that you are working on?
Q : We have been doing quite a bit of work in the last year or so with our packaging design community. We have actually put all our package design engineers through a four-hour ergonomics awareness. Handles are one of the things we talked about, but we actually put more pressure on them for the product size and weight, to try to get that down.
DR. RODGERS: And actually try to build that into the computer program that was used to decide about the type of packaging that was needed for the heavy products, particularly.
Yes.
Q: My name is Tom Doyle. I am with the State of Ohio, Division of Safety and Hygiene. And I was wondering, I know you guys at Kodak have been at this for a long time, I was wondering if you were going to publish some of these checklists as guides for other people. It looks like you have put together a workbook.
MR. JOHNSON: Well, we have the two-volume text out there, but that doesn't have a lot of these checklists in them as they are set up. A lot of data came from there, but not all of it. We are in the process, and Sue and I have to talk about this, Volume I is in the process of being rewritten. We are trying to start that up, and that may be a good addition to put in there. I hadn't thought about that. We'll have to make a note of that, Sue.
DR. RODGERS: NIOSH has published some good checklists in this area, too, and the OSHA standard had some checklists in it. I think the main thing you want to do is make sure you are asking those questions about all the risk factors. But don't forget, those are usually one factor at a time. It is the interaction of the factors that I think is terribly important in a lot of our jobs. It is not just the weight, but the weight and the time and the frequency together.
I think there is enough out there to try to do that. Certainly the latest OSHA one did try to bring that in as well. But there's a lot of good stuff out there. A lot of it is getting on the internet now and you may not see it in publication.
Q: I just know that you guys have been at it much longer than OSHA has, so that is why I bring it up.
DR. RODGERS: Yes. And I have to say that the older we get, the simpler we do get about it. We try to ask people if there a problem. If there is a problem, what do we need to do? That comes back to the main question, why is there a problem and what is it that creates the problem? If you know why the problem is there, fixing it is not difficult. As a matter of fact, you get lots of ways to fix it.
Q: I am Russ Hayward. I am with Mobil Oil Corporation. I don't know who to direct this to, maybe all of you. It is along the same lines as this gentleman. I have problems evaluating maintenance activities because they are not production line, they are not continuous, they are different from one minute to the next. Are there any, along the same lines, checklists or research or anything of that nature that I might look at to help me evaluate maintenance activities? Because we are seeing a lot of problems in these areas, and I don't see a lot of people discussing maintenance-type issues. It is more production line and production, same job for eight hours a day.
DR. RODGERS: I hate to say this, but you should have been over in the construction session.
Q: I was going back and forth actually.
DR. RODGERS: Because I think this is exactly the kind of problem. Mark, do you want to mention the way you have approached that?
MR. JOHNSON: Well, we are doing a couple of things with our maintenance group. They are very active in ergonomics right now and they started off with their shop steward. But one of the things they went after were hand tools. We have what we call ergonomics equipment catalog; and before anybody asks, it is not meant for outside the company distribution. When we find a unique tool that we think has some value to it, and it can be a piece of furniture, a tool, whatever, software, we put it in this catalog and it is distributed to our company worldwide.
But in this group with the maintenance folks, they have started out with the tool process and they are actually going through an evaluation of safety and ergonomics of every handtool that is provided by the company.
The other way is going back to, as Paula put it, get the operators involved. Let them do the assessments. I can give you checklists, and one of those checklists that I have is for a maintenance-type operation. You are going to find the stuff in there is very generic; what you really need to do, and this is where I have had some success in going at new equipment, is get the maintenance people to sit down with you and come up with a list of the types of tasks they are going to have to do, change filters, lubricate the pump, whatever, and then go through those jobs. Do a very cursory task analysis and then see how they are doing it.
Once they have the idea of what the things are that they want to look at from a force or repetition posture standpoint, then they will start being a little more creative. You know, little jackets on casters to slide underneath and then lift it up to the pump that is in the bottom of the tank. They can get down there on a little scoot stool, unbolt it, and then they jack it down and slide it out and they bring it over and jack it up to the bench. Something as simple as that to them is rocket science.
I did that with one of the chemical maintenance groups. They had this 75-pound pump sitting in the bottom of the tank, and they are trying to hold it with one hand and loosen the bolts with the other.
DR. RODGERS: A lot of good ones, I thought.
We will do one more question. If you want to get your buffet before it disappears, we have to finish up.
Why don't you go ahead and ask your question.
Q : Thank you. I have a question in general about the financing of the implementation of the solutions that you come up with. Do you find that they are usually cost-justified as part of the analysis or are budgets typically set aside? I am very curious about that.
DR. RODGERS: Tom, why don't you start with that.
MR. JACOB: It is done both ways, I guess. We have some money that is set aside, but most of them are probably done honestly from a productivity standpoint and is typically done out of headquarters for major initiatives. The other things are funded out of the location where they see a need to improve something, that will be funded out of their local budget. Does that answer your question?
Q : Well, yes. I guess everybody is aware that there are ergonomic issues in the workplace in corporate American, but are people really budgeting money to address those issues or are you pooling the money?
DR. RODGERS: Can I just answer that quickly, because I have a lot of different types of clients. The ones who are really wedded to this from a management standpoint often do set aside a very large budget for these things. I actually suggest a smaller budget, because I want people to be creative in their solutions. not do something that is going to be effective, but not jump to the automation. Go back to that process of why is there a problem, what do we need to change.
I usually give them $200 to start with, and what that forces you to do is to really understand the problem before you start solving it. That is the biggest problem I find is we jump to the equipment. There is a lot of good equipment out there and that ought to go in in the first place, but if you are going to have to retrofit, it is hard to get that funding.
Don has just one more on the example he gave. This was a good one.
MR. DAY: I gave you this example earlier, and the actual cost of fixing, at least in the Samsonite group, is based in that $2.5 million. One of the things about that, we have an actual analysis form that they use for analyzing whether it is going to be feasible or whether it is helping them to cost justify those things. They would actually do that on each one. All my clients do the same type of thing as well within the analysis process. So this is part of this. Now, the one thing you can't see is the exact amount associated with that.
Loyce, off the top of your head, $1.2 million for the fixes, something like that?
This is for all of the things that they had to do. But with that in mind, getting back to the cost justification, we have gone back and actually taken a look at the average for the '92, '93, '94 time frame, this is really since they have been into the whole ergonomics issue, and taken that as the base. If you take a look at the cost savings just for '96 and the cost that they were actually looking at, that is $740,000 per year.
Then take just a real conservative "what if" look at the hidden costs, the quality problems, production problems, all those type of things, take it three-fold, that is a potential savings of $1.-something-million a year. Then once management sees that, they start thinking a little bit more about it; and they will start thinking about how to budget for that.
Really what they have been able to do is, if you take that and say over a five-year time period, the time the program is in place, they could have, if you used that '92 through '96 time frame, they could have had a savings of over $3 million with this. But you have to be able to start tracking this and pulling that stuff out. That is what these guys have been able to do.
DR. RODGERS: After a while it adds up to real money.
Q : Do we have enough statistics on the retrospective savings to use examples with that as opposed to potential savings? Case studies?
DR. RODGERS: Yes, and your point is well taken, because things are being measured in terms of cost savings right now.
Let me just say that the true cost is never really known because that isn't collected. As you know, the budgets are in different pockets, so you can tell them we just saved workers' comp $500,000, but that is not on my budget line. That is an overhead issue that I don't see because it is distributed out to the different departments.
The biggest problem is getting a company without the $500,000 to put into it to understand that there are a lot of good solutions that can be done within the normal course of operations and as a result they save you money in the rest of your operations. I haven't seen one yet that cost too much unless it really wasn't carefully problem-solved, in other words, unless it was a large expenditure, and that may be fine. That may be part of a growth part of the industry, too.
Thanks very much for your attention. I hope to see you around the next set of sessions.
MR. JOHNSON: I have a copy of the RULA article if somebody wants to see that for a reference.
(Whereupon, the session ended.)
