NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Brad Joseph from MANUFACTURING 1
DR. MARRAS: Next we have a report by Brad Joseph of Ford.
DR. JOSEPH: I'm going to show a little bit, as Larry Fine called them, of pearls of wisdom that we learned from our group. We were pretty lucky, actually, when we setup our group. I think it happened by chance.
Maybe it was something higher than us that realized what was going on, but we were actually able to pull three people, one from a plant, who had a focus on a plant program; one was from a division and one was from the corporate perspective, and I think that was kind of neat because it allowed us to view programs from these different perspectives.
We were able to actually put some things together and talk about these things from different perspectives, and I'm curious how those things are going to pan out tomorrow morning when the session deals with small industry because I have a feeling that they'll be very similar, especially the plant level.
The first speaker was Sandy Le Sage. She works for Hay and Forage, basically a farm equipment manufacturer. I probably just destroyed that name, but close. As a farm equipment manufacturer, obviously, making large equipment and probably some smaller, but a lot of large equipment.
She had a videotape that did a couple of things. One was explain the program quite well and the other was explained some case studies, A picture is worth a thousand words. It showed how their program worked through interviews.
The program had four phases or types of training, and one of the recurring themes in our group was the management commitment process. Part one of the training needed to get management commitment. Let them know what it is, let them know what they're in for, and let them know how long it's going to take for an ergonomic training course and program to be implemented.
The second part of their process was dealing with the actual job improvement -- we call it job improvement cycle at Ford, but they call it something else, and basically how they identify jobs, using questionnaires and problems. They actually had a unique twist on it where they talked about some of the issues, some of the employees, some of their home activities, because they said people spend a lot of time at home, too, and some risk occurs at home.
Not that they're trying to show that is the reason for it, but that is one of the potential reasons for this problem to be aggravated at work.
They talked about job analysis, and one of the unique things about job analysis was doing it with the worker in the room to talk about their jobs. They had some one-on-one activity. They talked about how they put work orders and equipment changes together, and then they talked about the outcomes of these changes. Finally, the video demonstrated through case studies the positive outcomes of the process.
Generally, there is some interesting trends, a decrease in cumulative trauma disorder, and so on, like we all expected; but she also talked about some of the other positive aspects of the program like increase in productivity and quality.
The second speaker was Larry Kreh from PPG, and I was told it's a coatings organization. Actually, he was probably the first speaker. But it's a coatings organization. Coatings are more expensive than paint, so he told me to call it coating.
They charge $100 for a coating, they charge $10 for the paint. So you pick. I guess Ford uses coatings.
At any rate, he talked quite a bit about his divisional process. He's the manager of ergonomics and loss prevention for that particular division.
He talked about the overall PPG organization and then focused in on his particular area of the program. It was interesting because PPG does a lot of batch processing, and in the auto industry we don't do a lot of batch processing, so it was a different twist in how you do ergonomics in that kind of industry.
He showed us some interesting case studies of large batch processes being mixed and how employees had to move these loads and lug these things around in the earlier days, and now how some of the tooling is reducing the loads. Not total automation like we all expected but some tooling is being used to help these employees move things around.
He also mentioned a three-day training course. He primarily uses outside consultants, and there's some training going on internally. That training course is focused not only on the internal people but on customers, customers like Ford. We could actually go to his training course, which I thought was a best practice.
Prioritization effort. They prioritize on a number of things, including OSHA recordables.
Finally, integration. One of the key things he wanted to talk about was integration and engineering services. He, and I, felt that was one of the key things that made the program successful.
Interesting thing about Larry, he came from engineering. A lot of our people in ergonomics come from health and safety and then go to engineering. He actually started in engineering and went to health and safety, so he was able to bring those important contacts important things with him.
He talked about some of the initial challenges, and one of them that was just mentioned was the issue of process versus program - what should ergonomics be?
I was the third speaker, and I'll just briefly mention what I did. I basically went through a corporate level process and I discussed or defined what I thought was a best practices from a Ford Motor Company perspective, and I talked a little bit about how the best practice is something that needs to be replicated in all the plants, at least some of the core parts of the best practices.
Some of the main issues that I talked about was we have a core program in place. UAW-Ford does not want to turn it upside down on its ear and start all over again, so our focus has been on small, incremental improvements. Incremental improvements have to add value, and they should be replicated where possible.
We discussed the reactive versus our proactive process, showed some case studies, and we talked about a new best practice called Ergonomic Handbook, that's been distributed to the hourly employees and the supervisors, and some of the empowerment that this particular process is giving them through education. I guess in the last session we heard about education versus training. The proper word to use now is education.
The last thing I mentioned was a thing called a risk priority number, which deals with the issue of prioritization of jobs for intervention. I know there was a concurrent session going on during this that talked about risk assessment and job analysis.
They mostly talked about the deep dive job analysis rather than job identification methods--but I am talking about the identification process, and we're looking at ways of doing this better in our process.
As a summary, just a couple things:
Management commitment was vital.
Employee involvement was vital.
Process not a program.
Most of these things have positive results but they're not quick. They're not going to happen tomorrow morning.
Many questions from the audience on those processes, and a lot of the questions on how did you do it? Or get there? We brought the issue back to the person who asked and we told them, "Here's how we did it, how did you?"
A lot of questions on work organizations and exercise programs.
Drive the process down from corporate to the division to the plant.
Certain core processes, core disciplines are required everywhere, and again incremental changes are the way to proceed.
That's kind of our lessons learned from our particular group, our best practices.
Thank you.
DR. MARRAS: Thank you, Brad.
