NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Karl Ziegfried, Bath Iron Works
MR. CIMMINO: The next speaker I would like to introduce is Mr. Karl Ziegfried. Karl is the corporate ergonomist for Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. He has been apply ergonomic interventions at the shipyard for over eight years and is responsible for ergonomic program development, direction and training. Karl is the Chairperson for the Corporate Ergonomic Task Force on Cumulative Trauma Disorders and consultant for Bath Iron Works ADA Compliance Committee.
During his career, he has performed over 500 ergonomic analyses, developed and presented training for employees on office as well as production ergonomics. He has also acted as Project Leader on multiple ergonomic intervention projects. Please welcome Karl Ziegfried.
MR. ZIEGFRIED: Thank you, Dan. Can we shut the lights out? Is there somebody back there that can -- pay no attention to that voice behind the curtain.
As Dan mentioned, my name is Karl Ziegfried from BIW. While we try to get the design -- is there a human factors engineer that can help Brian back here with the lights?
BIW is located in Bath, Maine on the shore of the Kenebec River. Right now, we're a defense contractor primarily. I say primarily, because we unfortunately at this point can't compete in the commercial market, but we're certainly trying to go forward with that. We do everything by unit construction as most folks within the shipbuilding industry does. The thing that makes BIW somewhat unique is the way that we launch our ships. We still launch them stern first. It goes down a set of ways. It's quite a monumental feat, and it's very prestigious to actually watch, but it is somewhat archaic. And we're looking actually to advance into that.
We've recently been purchased by General Dynamics Corporation. So we are an affiliate of them now. This is some of the units that we build inside. Also, we do build units outside. And when you're dealing with units in the outside, you're dealing with a lot of different weather factors, especially in Maine. Obviously, everybody has been talking here at the conference thus far about coming to Chicago in January. Well, actually, we came to Chicago and it kind of warmed up a little bit.
This is the show of an outside unit being constructed. One of the first things that we did in BIW when we first started the program was to develop some type of a database, because we had to find out exactly where our injuries were occurring, what was the major causes of those injuries. So we, in fact, did that. And right now our injury rates for 1996, I just got them, for lost time injuries -- and we use lost time injury rate as the key factor.
Ergonomic injuries was 2.6 and for actual cumulative trauma disorders, it was .89. So we've been able to actually see a very large decrease in these injuries since we started keeping track specifically of ergonomic injuries in 1992.
When we actually developed the database, these are the key factors that we put in or the key words that we put in. Anytime an employee comes into the medical department and says in their injury description that they were doing one of these tasks, it is keyed in as an ergonomic injury. So we're counting ergonomic injuries as including head and neck strains and stresses all the way down to tarsal tunnel in the feet. Okay. I mean, we count all, not all, but most back injuries that are not traumatic in nature as an ergonomic injury, groins, strains, et cetera. So we try to keep things very, very complete.
BIW has very much a team work affair, very much of what Chico was talking about here just previously involving the worker. We had to go forward in 1992 when we had the Chairman of the Board, then, Buzz Fitzgerald, sitting down talking about ergonomics at a Board meeting. It certainly gave us a real good shot in the arm. We basically attacked that in a way of showing them that good ergonomics meant that you were going to actually increase quality and improve our competitiveness. And we've been able to show that time and time again.
To the Union folks, we basically preach that certainly their workers are going to be healthier, safer and are going to be able to do the things that they like to do, not only at the shipyard and remain viable, but also at home with their families. So it's a real good relationship that we basically built up.
When we looked at it, we knew that there were certain barriers when it comes to an ergonomic process. And again, I refer to it as a process just as they referred to it earlier today. A program has a definite start and stop. Okay. And when you're dealing with ergonomics, it's a continual process, and it certainly has been at BIW. Once you have the leadership commitment and developing clear and realistic goals, we did form a joint Union Committee or a joint Ergonomics Committee. And it basically was comprised of Union folks as well as salaried folks. And we go on out, and I have a slide here in a second that's going to show all this in a little bit better detail.
But basically, worker and supervisor involvement is absolutely key. There's probably no better ergonomist that work in the shipyards or in general industry for that matter other than the workers themselves and the supervisors. There's a way to do it easier if you tell them what you're trying to eliminate. You show them what you're trying to eliminate, bring them into the process, you're going to be successful.
Rigorous problem-solving processes is important. Expertise on the Ergonomics Committee is also real good. And again, start small and expand slowly.
This is what we used for the problem-solving and decision-making. It's a Kepner Trago form. Is anybody in here familiar with Kepner Trago form of problem analysis? No. It's actually pretty complete, and you don't need to be an expert in it in any problem-solving, but it certainly helps. I mean, if you go on out into a large industry and you have 8,300 employees, which is what BIW is currently at, you need to be able to break it down somehow. And this is one of the processes that we do that we use along with comparing actual injuries.
This shows you the actual process. We do have a core team. The core team is made up of safety professionals, engineering folks, tool engineers. It's made up of a chief stewart at one of the off-site plants and another worker and myself. When we're going out, we identify an area that needs to be changed. We will go in and we will pull workers and supervision from that area and train them also in basic ergonomics. And we involve them into the process as well.
Then once making up the Union team, we go on out. We do evaluations. A lot of the times, the workers and the folks on the shop floor will actually go in. In one of the real large projects that we did, we actually had team meetings where we brought in all the workers from the floor. We trained them in the basics of ergonomics, and we told them what we were trying to get rid of. And then we opened up the floor. Said, okay, what would you do to make your job better? This is what we're trying to actually do.
We used their ideas. We brought them into the process and actually we made our designs and re-designs at that point. After we did the designs and actually re-designed, we made little pilot workstations. Again, we started small instead of changing a whole line. We set up three mock workstations with the involvement of the employees. We rotated all the employees through those workstations, met with them again and said, what did you like? What did you dislike? And then took those things and modified the stations a little bit more.
We did not listen to everything. We did not go with everything the employees told us, but we basically worked with them to work through the process. A lot of their ideas were very good ones. Went through the recommendation approval cycle. Basically, the entire team coordinated the implementation. And after we did so, we reanalyzed the changes to make sure what we did was correct.
The measurement tools that we use on each one of our projects are one or multiple of these factors. Precaution levels: As mentioned earlier -- and a lot of this stuff I know might be redundant, because a lot of folks have talked about -- the process is the process for most folks. But when you're dealing with industry and you're trying to get a buy-in, the first thing you look at is production levels. We've been able to basically pay for each one of the projects just on efficiency gains, not to mention the amount of lost injuries that we've been able to do.
Injury and illness dollars is also a good thing to tap into to. You can get that information from your workers' comp area or from your own insurance company.
Product quality actually does go up.
Scope of Work: And I put scope of work down there, because in one of the areas that we looked at, we didn't see a real significant decrease in or increase in efficiencies. But what we actually found was that the scope of work has changed or they're doing more items or more things to the item before going out to the ship.
Employee Morale: It's a hard thing to put a dollar figure on, but it's a real easy thing to measure. You walk through an area after being there for a while and people start walking up to you and start saying hello and asking you how you're doing, employee morale is good. And if anybody ever has gotten into the psycho-social issues concerning injury and injury management, you want to get employee morale as high as possible.
Last but not least is risk factors. You can also go in and do another risk factor analysis. The one in the proposed draft is the proposed ergonomic draft is a real good one to use if you just want to measure your stages. You basically do one before and do one after and compare notes.
Shipbuilding is unique like Dan pointed out, because you have three different types of environments where in most industries you might only have two. In shipbuilding, you certainly have an office environment. You have a shop or fab environment, and you have a shipboard environment. Your methods that you actually use or the control strategies that you use in each of these areas are different. Certainly, in the office environment, it's fairly easy to control the environment.
When you can control the environment, you can basically effect problems in an engineering or workstation design control. You can also use administrative controls quite easily in an office type of environment, especially when you have total control.
When you're dealing in a shop environment, you still have control to a point. You have control to a point prior to the ship being or prior to unit construction. Everything that is basically fabricated to put into the unit, you can use. There's where you can basically jump down through workstation design. This is the lift table that we put in on a drilling operation. And I have a bunch of slides here I'm going to buzz through here fairly quickly to show you some of the changes that we've made.
A lot times in a shop environment, you can invoke engineering controls. You can effect the process. Okay. You can redesign things, look at material handling issues. So it becomes quite effective.
And then we have shipboard. I'm sure that each one of my distinguished panel would agree if we were to ergonomically design a ship, it would barely fit into the ocean. Okay. I mean, it would humongous. There would not be any of this type of operation. By the way, he's in the overhead. The slide is in the correct way and basically trying to get something done in the overhead. This is a fact of life when it comes to shipbuilding, and this is where we would have had a major problem had the ergo standard gone through the way it was.
It's extremely difficult to effect engineering changes in a shipboard environment. What we have done is we've tried to provide the workers with the proper tools or the right kind of tools to do the job. We've preached on a lot of administrative controls to effect change. So there are things you can do. I'm not -- please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that, oh, well, there's nothing you can do. There are things that you can do, but it gets a lot more difficult as these areas start to get more confined.
Picture for a second working on the top of your chair and then two seconds from now having to crawl underneath all of these chairs to get to the back door. There, you have shipbuilding. Okay. When it gets into that type of environment, so you need to work a lot on education and training. At BIW, we have basically put everybody in the facility through some form of either back training and/or cumulative trauma schools. Here, we basically go through and we explain to them what the associated job hazards are. We want these people to know what the hazards are.
We give them talks and we talk about static postures. You can see from that first slide why static postures would be real important. We let them know what they are in ways that they can basically get rid of those static postures.
Types of Cumulative Trauma Disorders: And I put signal risk factors up here. We want them to know these things.
Identification of Symptoms: We want people to identify their symptoms so that they can seek help if, in fact, they're having problems early. We know that early intervention is key. The average back injury at BIW without lost time is right around $800. With lost time, it's right up over $20,000. That's a major difference.
Injury Reporting: We basically let them know how to report an injury although most folks in a production environment I found are much more willing to actually report injuries than folks in the office environment.
And last but least is Injury Prevention Techniques: We basically show them how to prevent these things from happening. At BIW, we have a thing called "Fit for Work." Every morning 12 minutes prior to work, we go through and they can do some exercises which is paid for right through BIW. It's quite effective actually. It just basically gets people warmed up prior to work.
We also do training for managers. A lot of times, we do the training with the employees and the managers present. And then in some instances, we've actually brought managers in and train nothing but managers. 'Cause sometimes, the subject topic is a little bit different. We key on the who, what and why and where of cumulative trauma disorders. We also let them know whose responsibility it is for safety and health programs. Basically, everybody's but we really key very heavily on the managers.
Company and Area Statistics: I knew I was going to tongue-tied on that one. But basically, if you can show statistics from one area in another area, a lot of times you can managers trying to compete against each other. That's a real healthy type of competition.
And then Financial Impact to Ergo Injuries: One you show them that the average ergonomic injury cost over, lost time injury cost over $20,000, and we're looking at reducing overhead as much as possible at BIW to remain competitive, it has an impact.
Bottom Line Reducing Injury is definitely -- improves quality and production. We've shown that on several different occasions.
Now, these are just a bunch of slides, and I might go through these fairly quickly. But these are slides of just some of the things that we've been able to implement, well, at least for the past six years. The first two years was basically getting going. These are portable, or not portable, but fixed saw horses that we have in one of our assembly buildings. Basically, every piece of steel prior to being welded has to have a pneumatic grinding run across it. Prior to those saw horses being in place, all that stuff was done directly on the ground.
You folks understand the biomechanics of working in a bent over posture and kneeling versus standing upright like this gentleman is doing. Every time I walk through a shop and I see a piece of work that they're actually doing something on saw horses, it kind of brings a little smile to me. Because four years ago, you wouldn't see this. Everything was still done on the ground.
For some reason, we had in our mentality that if you got it up in the air, it was going to take up more room until they actually started doing it. Or it was going to take more time. Actually, we've shown that you've been able to reduce time, increase operator comfort and basically get the job done faster.
Again, this is just a person painting a piece of -- bent on a set of saw horses.
Pallets: How many of you folks in here have an area where you use pallets? Okay. I mean, when you're dealing with pallets, everything generally is on the floor which either means it's loaded on the floor or unloaded on the floor. If you're lucky enough, a forklift does it all for you. What we did here, these are moveable Q-tables that we have and they're on wheels. So basically, they can wheel them around. You can use it for actually moving around material handling aspects. And this is right at 30 inches, so it's at a perfect height for the start of a lift.
Chico mentioned building units inverted. This is a shot of an inverted unit. Basically, people here are working on a ceiling. If you can imagine putting all this pipe in the overhead with your back hyper-extended, the benefits of working down instead of up.
This is another thing that we were able to do that actually helped the folks that were shipboard. This is an old welding unit. We used to have a 12 inch wheel of welding wire on here. The total weight was about 90 pounds. We've gone to the smaller suitcase feeder and to a smaller reel. Basically, we have reduced the amount of scrap basically, going from the welding wire. And we've reduced the weight to 35 pounds. So that was a significant improvement.
And then we actually fabricated this unit to basically sit the suitcase feeders in so we can lift it aboard ship so people don't have to worry about climbing up seven flights of steps to get onto the ways, go through the cardiac stress of basically doing that. Basically, the crane just picks it up and moves it to where it needs to go.
In one of the main areas that we worked on in the door shop, folks out there were actually getting an injury, a back injury, on an average of once every two weeks, there was a back injury. It was a terrible, terrible situation. Folks were basically moving things by hand. This shows you how they used to flip a small piece of door frame over. What we did was we basically modified a couple of engine stands and made a jig to hook onto it. And basically, the person just sits there and turns the lever now and rotate the door.
Same scenario here. All this was actually done by hand. This is the old way of doing it. It was either horizontal or vertical. Basically, we've attached some engine stands to it, and now that can stop at any degree. Actually, we've increased efficiency there. It used to take them 40 hours to build doors. Now, we're down to about 31 hours to build the door.
Needle Gun: Basically, prior to, and this is just a real simple easy fix, this is a piece of pipe threaded rod. Of course, it's done safely where the person is using a needle gun standing up instead of kneeling down. Okay. There is no reason to have to kneel down to actually needle gun which basically just takes off the scale from welds.
These are tools that we're experimenting with. This is a standard tool. This is what they call an ergonomic tool. It has composite handle. The air is basically being driven out the back. It's pneumatic. It's a pneumatic brush. Most of the folks that are using these tools now do like them. We've made a very large investment of these at BIW.
It's an air gun. I only really have one of these in, but we're looking at it basically for blow down purposes. Instead of using just a thumb, you can employ two fingers on the lever.
This is dyna-pack machine. It goes well over 50 pounds. Prior to having this wheel unit on here, everything was carried by hand. Now, you can basically just push it down and wheel it around. I think you can get the idea here that a lot of things that we have done are small. Okay. They're little things that we have done that we've implemented over the years that over the long run has made a significant difference in our injuries. Our injuries are consistently going down. They're in a downward trend.
This is basically two suction cups on either side of this with a hydraulic ram to push this steel down. Before this, we used to use hammers and wedges to actually beat the steel to get it down even with the plate. Now, you basically just put this in, plug it in, pump it up and you're done.
These are transfer balls in front of a shear. Put a sheet on there, it's real easy to move it around and push it forward. Okay. It reduces a lot of stress. And again, transfer balls on top of the table to move sheets.
Cranes: Cranes are the best technique I can possibly think of to actually move material. The best way, I'm sure everybody will agree, the best lift is no lift -- is no weight anyway.
In one of the other areas that we did, these are all jib cranes. You can't see this real clearly, but this is in the pipe shop. We tried to provide each area with two methods of lifting things mechanically. These are jib cranes. There's also an overhead bridge crane in there. Okay. We've seen significant decreases in injuries there also.
Tool Bouncer: On this reamer machine. It's a beveler, a pipe beveler. It goes over 40 pounds. Before we put this counter balance in there. Basically, they were holding it by hand.
Pipe Carts: We actually fabricated up. If you can look at all this spaghetti type of pipe that's here. Prior to putting these carts in, everything was just piled onto the floor. Try to get a piece of pipe out of that. Okay. It was terrible. Not only was it frustrating and time consuming, it was also hazardous for the employees to actually do the tugging and the pulling. These carts have made a big difference, these --- type carts we designed.
This is in front of a shear. It's an old table in front of the shear. And basically, what we did was we put another Southworth lift table behind the shear on a roller. So basically, the parts come, they fall onto the shear. The employee then pulls the unit back. We have handles that you insert here. You pull the unit back and basically press a pedal, and it comes up to unload it. Prior to that, all the unloading was done directly down flat on the ground in a bent over posture.
This is a dandy lift. These are great. Little carts to use. You can pump them up with your feet to the appropriate work height. They work good for moving material around. We've even used them in some areas as temporary work benches.
If you get a lot of material delivered in these metal or any types of boxes, I really recommend this type of set up. This is an easy reach. Basically, the machine is designed to tilt the product up. So instead of bending over, the person can remove the product standing in an upright position. It really cuts down on all the bending that's performed.
Last but not least are the things that I probably dislike the most. These are what they call metal dogs. Throughout the shipyard, for many years, they used these items to pound, to basically secure the framework down prior to doing welding. And these dogs weigh between -- well, some of them only weigh three or four pounds. The ones here weigh 12 to 15 pounds, and they would take a sledge hammer and drive them down into the steel table. This is an acorn -- it's a cast iron table.
A lot of stress was being done, so what we did was we actually purchased a clamp. We modified it. We cut the bottom off of it, and we constructed our own dye so it will actually slip into the table and basically employ, puts it down. It's a retch-type clamp. You ratchet it closed. It's nice and secure. It doesn't move. Okay. We basically eliminated the need for people to pound on dogs.
This is how the clamp comes, and this is another table design that we actually came up with. You see, there's little stars on the table on the table top. This was an employee's idea about doing the stars versus doing a ridge which one of our engineers came up with. Basically, you can just walk on in there, slide one of those clamps in and basically hold it down into place. We did have to put those everywhere we possibly could, or we basically designed them to make sure that it had total coverage on the table so they work quite well.
This is our modified workstation with a lift table with a table top, and it works out quite well.
Q-tables: We use them as much as possible to get the product to there. Once the product is done, we toss them in these boxes which is fine, because those are moved by a crane. You don't have to bend over to do that.
Slag Hammer: This is a little thing that we did was we actually had to design and patent a spring for the handle. I got the idea basically just from my wood stove actually and reducing shock where people use it to pound on welds. Basically, we had to design and patent out own spring handle for this just to reduce us a little bit of stress, a little bit of shock. And again, this is something that can be used shipboard as well.
Those are things that we've done at BIW, and it's been quite successful. Any questions? Thank you.
