Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics

For enterprises today, innovations are the best form of protection against competitors (BULLINGER 2006). The reason is obvious. Innovations make for higher prices and larger market shares because they satisfy customer requirements better than existing products or services, deliver enhanced product quality, or enable the product development time to be accelerated (GÜNTHER & FISCHER 2000, FISCHER 2000 (Fig. 1.1)) – time which can in turn be reinvested. A mere cost reduction, on the other hand, only permits the price range to be lowered.

Competition between manufacturing companies in high-wage and low-wage countries typically occurs within two dimensions: the production-oriented economy and the planning-oriented economy (BRECHER et al. 2007). Low-wage countries’ productions economically compensate possible disadvantages within process times, factor consumption and process mastering by low productive factor cost. In contrast, companies in high-wage countries try to maximize the economies-of scale – that is, the utilization of the relatively expensive productivity factors. More and more unit cost disadvantages arise for high-wage countries, which they try to compensate through customizing and fast adaptations to market needs, economies-of-scope. The share of production within the value chain decreases more and more. Thus the realizable economies-of-scale decreases too. The escape into sophisticated niche markets is not promising, either.

At the present time, all modern societies experience changes in socio-economic terms and go through far-reaching processes of change in economic and social structures. Examples of dilemmas that characterize these processes are tightened stress of competition, short product and innovation cycles, a continuous adjustment of qualification standards and an increase of flexible, unsecured employer-employee relationships (HENNING et al. 2007).

The area of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its interaction with social changes on organizational, individual and societal levels has, in the 21st Century attracted increasing attention, due to the depth and wide use of ICT. The focus on the ICT related disciplines has focused far too much on the “technology push” in contrast to human needs and requirements of the development, introduction and use of ICT. This was also the reason, when organising and chairing the Fourth ODAM conference (Organisational Design and Management) in Stockholm in 1994, that this author gave the conference the subtitle – “Development, Introduction and Use of New Technology – Challenges for Human Organisation and Human Resource Development in a Changing World”.

Community Ergonomics (CE) was developed from two parallel directions. One came from existing theories and principles in Human Factors/Ergonomics and Behavioral Cybernetics which have been applied to assess situations and find solutions at a macroergononic level (SMITH 1966, SMITH & KAO 1971, HENDRICK 1986, CARAYON & SMITH 2000, TAVEIRA & SMITH 2006). The second direction emerged from the careful and thorough documentation of specific case studies of communities, which in turn led to additional principles and theories with more contextual relevance (SMITH, CONWAY & SMITH 1966, SAINFORT & SMITH 1996).

The European automotive service sector is dominated by global acting car producers which produce cars at a high level of quality. But developing respective qualifications and competences for servicing cars is the objective of technical education and vocational training systems (TEVT) in Europe which are different in terms of historical roots and their institutions and organizational structure.

For industrial organizations, as well as others, the general pursuit of optimized performance is nothing new. Changed frame conditions, for example globalization, increased transparency caused by information technology and the world wide web as well as increasing customer demands result in a performance pressure – not only for companies but also for the shop floor level. But other developments like the discussion about corporate social responsibility (ZINK 2003) – or more general about sustainability in its triple bottom line understanding e.g. in the context of global supply chains – are new demands for companies as well.

The importance of technological innovations for maintaining and strengthening a company’s competitiveness, especially in high-wage countries, has increased eminently. Market internationalisation, shorter product lifecycles and the soaring demand for resources are only a few of the possible explanations. In the global race for business deals, time is a crucial factor. Ideally, the period from the initial idea to the innovation should be restricted to an absolute minimum. The company’s ability to manage complex systems is a further criterion that often tips the scales between success and failure. In other words, innovations alone are no guarantee of growth. Lasting success depends on the interaction between innovations and efficient complexity management (ARTHUR 2007). For this reason, in particular, technology development processes need to be reorganised, because in the turbulence of technological change the classic “technology push” and “market pull” models, as well as their combination, are no longer applicable.

Nowadays, technical excellence is not enough to enthuse the customer for a product. Absolute freedom from error is a basic requirement, but how can the customer be rendered enthusiastic about future products? The answer to this question lies in the creation of optimal customer-specific products. Perceived quality of a product is constituted by all visual, tactile, acoustic and olfactory impressions. “Perceived Product Quality” adds customer group specific and subjective perceptible characteristics to the basic understanding of quality. Until now, there is no comprehensive systematic approach to close the gap between subjective customer perception and objective product characteristics.

After several decades of ongoing globalization and keen competition, enterprises find themselves faced with increasing market demands on individual, customized solutions. At the same time, global markets require shorter product creation processes at lower expenses in order to remain competitive. Due to this fact the technical innovation proceeds and leads to more complex products and processes as well as an unmanageable portfolio of individual solutions.

With the Aachen PPC model and the reference models of service and maintenance, the FIR has set standards in the past which provide the basis for an efficient processing of orders in both production and services within manufacturing industries and maintenance. In the course of advancing those reference models efficient transaction of business processes in production and service has reached a state that is essential for customer oriented and efficient transaction of processes today.

Tolling systems came up in the ‘70s to deal with traffic gridlocks that occurred in more and more major cities throughout the world. In the beginning, these road charging schemes were operated manually with toll booths. In 1986 the first electronic toll collection (ETC) system was introduced in Norway. From this moment on ETC systems have developed all over the world. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) systems dominated the market until 2005. An in-car transponder communicates with roadside equipment in a DSRC-based tolling system.

Health care expenditures have risen considerably in the past – especially in Germany they have already exceeded 10% of the entire gross domestic product (OECD 2006). The main reason for this development is a dramatic demographic change process. Enormous medical progress and continuous technological improvements, together with a positive socio-economical situation, are leading to an aging population, which is directly resulting in a growing number of elderly and chronically ill patients. The consequence is a clear tendency to longer hospitalizations and growing costs per treated case.

Ergonomists offer services to organizations. The goal of their work is to provide safety and health at work in combination with a sound human performance. However, the impact of ergonomics efforts is not always as good as ergonomists and human factors specialists want. This chapter aims to support these specialists in their work. Starting with the developments in ergonomics from its two basis backgrounds, it focuses on the benefits of ergonomics for companies and workers. An example of an approach, performed at large scale, illustrates how the impact of ergonomics can be illustrated. The chapter continues with a view on education and training of skills and competencies, and with a note on certification.

The starting situation for activities related to health and safety at work in companies is characterised by a great deal of latitude for interpretation as regards the statutory outline conditions, with which companies respond individually to changes in the world of work and thus are able to open up potential in different ways. The flexibilisation of the world of work brings with it for example fresh demands on the skills and resources of employees. The intensification of work and expansion of responsibility leads to increased psychological stresses on employees. And not least, KRUEGER (2008) also highlights the significance of demographic change, particularly for SMEs: in the next two decades, we may anticipate an ageing (working) population across Europe.

The term “shiftwork” may refer to working either at “various times of day” (e.g. morning, afternoon, and night shift) or at “constantly unusual times” (e.g. permanent night shift, permanent afternoon shift).

Today’s work is characterized by ongoing change processes. Although this is not a new phenomenon, there are signs, that these changes accelerate, become more important and vary in intensity, duration and frequency. Diverse trends in economics, politics and technology put pressure on organizations to optimize both their strategic position and their business performance (see Fig. 17.1).

Organizations and humans forget. Both tend to lose previously acquired knowledge. Moreover, when forced to change, they have to learn how to discard competences and skills they already possess, even if they are distinctive components of their own identity. The learning process itself is often accomplished, for both organizations and humans, through a complex interaction between oblivion and knowledge creation.

The effects of goal setting on performance have been a major topic of psychological research. The most influential contribution to the field was made by Locke and Latham who developed goal-setting theory (LOCKE & LATHAM 1990, 2006). According to Locke and Latham, goals are conscious intentions of a person referring to desired future end states of action. Goals can have their origin within the acting person or they can be set (more or less participatively) in discussions with other individuals (e.g., supervisors, colleagues). Independent of the origin of goals, goal-setting theory assumes that effects of goals on performance – once they are formed as an intention – mainly depend on two features: the objective

difficulty

of goals and their

specificity

.

Collaborative product design has been one of the most powerful and potential ways for companies to develop complex products in shorter development time. However, as the process is becoming more and more complex because of new forms of work and organization styles, the management of the development process becomes more and more challengeable.

In all engineering disciplines, design processes are a fundamental and frequent task. They serve to elaborate an

artifact description that satisfies a given functional specification

(MOSTOW 1985). In chemical engineering, these artifacts are chemical products, the associated production plants including the process and control equipment, and operation and management support systems (MARQUARDT & NAGL 2004). The artifacts are described by documents such as process flow diagrams, equipment lists, and construction plans.

Similar to television overuse a couple of decades ago, overuse of interactive computer games is causing a lot of public debate. Spectacular cases like a highschool student who killed several people after seven hours of violent computer games cause politicians to demand stringent regulations about so-called “killer games”, or even full control over Internet usage by young people.

SUH (1990) presented a design framework that is known as axiomatic design (AD). The goal of AD was to establish a scientific basis for design and to improve design activities by providing the designer with a theoretical foundation based on logical thought processes (SUH 2001). Since 1990, many applications of AD have been reported in various fields of study (e.g. TATE 2000, EL-HAIK & TATE 2002).

One of the crucial concepts of Action Theory is task identity, i.e. the completeness vs. fragmentation of tasks (FRESE & SABINI 1985, HACKER 1985).

The completeness vs. fragmentation is a consequence of two basic concepts: Firstly, the approach of the allocation of functions between employees and machines and secondly, the approach of the division of the remaining labor between employees.

The basic axioms and features of the action-regulation theory (ART), developed primarily in German, are described in English by HACKER (1985, 2003), and FRESE and ZAPF (1994). Human-centered job design should follow three goals simultaneously (HACKER 2003, HACKER & RICHTER 2006): enhancement of efficiency, from the point of view of both enterprises and employees, optimization of psycho-physiological strain, and enhancement of physical and mental health, including personality development due to the learning potential of the job.

Before we can say anything about the promotion of creative behavior we need to reflect on the concept of creativity itself.

Complexity is widely seen as an emerging phenomenon of an increasingly engineered and networked society. This obviously includes work life and, hence, ergonomics issues as well. However, the complexity phenomenon seems to be inherent to all ergonomics issues. This again would require consideration of complexity as a fundamental principle for ergonomics.

The graphic term “ergonomics” as a combination of the Greek

ergon

, (1 Erg was the former term for work) and

nomos

(the Greek term for order or fundamental science) translated freely, has to do with the more bland

work

science

, a science which is expected to contribute to the design of user-friendly products and working conditions which are adequate for human beings. Ergonomics or the more precise anglo-american term “Human Factors Engineering” makes clear that fundamental knowledge about the functioning of the human body, i.e. the most complex system on earth, is indispensable for activities in this field. In this context, the definition of Ergonomics according to IEA, the International Ergonomics Association shows the way and the objectives of a scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theoretical principles, data, and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.

It is a major concern of ergonomics to align humanity with economic efficiency. Ergonomic approaches that are introduced after the requests from employees or even worse after the first diagnoses of work-related health problems follow a corrective manner, and therefore cannot fulfill this concern. Especially the integration of corrective measures into completed work design is in most cases difficult and high priced. Absence due to illness of staff members is connected to premium rates, breaking-in costs of new staff members, capital expenditure, insurance contributions of possible unused capital equipment, or increased costs for planning and controlling on the side of management.

It is generally agreed that the measurement of work stress and strain provides indication of the appropriateness of work design, i.e. information which is necessary for verifying whether working conditions are in accordance with the criteria of human-centred design (LUCZAK 1998). Accordingly, such an analysis represents an important pre-condition for the evaluation of work-systems. Furthermore an assessment of mental workload is required by legislation, such as the “Machinery Directive” or the “EU Directive on the minimum health and safety requirements for work with display screen equipment”. Both directives contain the obligation to measure mental stress of operators or employees.

Ergonomics – or human factors – concerns the scientific discipline about the interactions between humans which are active in a system. The terms refer also to the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design overall systems (IEA 2000).

In 2003 a comprehensive workers compensation board data set was reviewed to identify and describe injury and illness trends in the Sawmill industry of Alberta, Canada (JONES & KUMAR 2004a). During the period reviewed MSIs accounted for 33% of the total cost and 38% of total time lost due to claim, more than any other injury category. Musculoskeletal injuries (MSIs) in the upper extremity resulted in 1698 Workers Compensation Board Claims, more than any other body region. Given the impact of MSIs on the sawmill industry, prevention has become a primary focus of health and safety programs.

It has become increasingly clear in practice that the requirements placed on pilots and their crews are becoming increasingly complex and difficult. Not least of all, questions of aviation safety also have to be addressed in this respect (Safety – “The state of not being threatened, which is objectively presented by the presence of protection or the absence of sources of danger, and that is perceived as the certainty of individual and social structures regarding the reliability of protective devices.”/Meyers Lexikon 1980/. Despite DIN 31619-2 and DIN 32541, however, it must be assumed that there is no generally valid definition of the expression “Safety” at the present time.

The author had long been thinking about writing this article. In the USSR, and subsequently in the post-Soviet period, one of the factors limiting the development of ergonomics was a misunderstanding of its core by overwhelming majority of engineers, designers, developers and technologists. In those cases where they had begun to realize its importance and then learned this discipline, previously unknown to them, I encountered a resistance to incorporating its principles and data in engineering and design activities. This was substantiated by the fact that ergonomic statements had often been formulated only in a qualitative form, and not in a quantitative one.

The term accessibility was originally not related to information technology and related appliances, but to building construction. The Civil Rights Act in the USA, passed in 1964, together with an increasing awareness of the problems many people were encountering with barriers to accessibility, led Congress to take a careful look at the problem in 1965 while considering the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendment. The Disability Civil Rights Movement, active since the 1960s and 1970s, finally led to ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) of 1990. The milestones between these dates are less important than the origins of the term, Civil Rights Movement on the one hand and architecture on the other. Creating barrier-free access to public buildings for all people was the major goal.

Product development has a long history with many influences from a multitude of disciplines. Up to the 19th century, products were engineered and produced by craftsmen or in manufactories. In the process of industrialization, engineering and production were separated which led the development of products to a new era.

Human-machine interfaces for dynamic technical systems (such as industrial processes, vehicles, etc.) are a particularly important and complex subset of user interfaces. The design of these interfaces has become so sophisticated that it can, already for quite some time, no longer be handled in an intuitive fashion. The designer needs to possess a huge amount of multidisciplinary knowledge and experience with respect to the application domain of the respective technical process, the available automation and information technologies, the capabilities and limitations of the human users (human operators, maintenance personnel, and others), work psychological and organizational matters as well as ergonomic and cognitive engineering principles of good human-machine interface design.

Supervisory control of complex systems or processes by a human operator can be understood as a superordinated control loop of the technical system. In this procedure there are three steps: (1) the operator monitors the state of a process or system, (2) he analyses and assesses it in comparison with a desired state, and finally (3), a correction by a specific operation is planned and carried out, if necessary. In the context of military aerial surveillance, the essential identification and classification tasks of aircrafts are based on various sensors and data exchange with other military units. Numerous additional conditions (e.g. the political situation) have to be considered. To assist operators in aerial surveillance tasks as well as in time-critical situations and at a computer workstation with a high informational workload, the design of ergonomic human-computer interaction is a crucial factor.

Imagine you click on a file on your computer by mistake. The computer processes the information and starts to open the corresponding application. But this takes some time. You immediately recognize your mistake and prepare to close the application right after it opens to continue your intended task. You feel distracted and helpless and your feelings are accompanied by facial expressions and inner thoughts. How would it be if the technical system could understand your mistake by analyzing selective information of you, the user? Like humans do in face-to-face communication, the system would recognize your mistake almost as soon as you did and adapt accordingly.

In high-wage countries many manufacturing systems are highly automated. The main aim of automation is usually to increase productivity and reduce personnel expenditures. However, it is well known that highly automated systems are very investment-intensive and often generate a non-negligible organizational overhead that is mandatory for production scheduling, numerical control programming or system maintenance, but does not directly add value to the product to be manufactured. Highly automated manufacturing systems therefore tend to be neither efficient enough for small lot production (ideally one piece) nor flexible enough to handle products to be manufactured in a large number of variants. In order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage for manufacturing companies in high-wage countries with their highly skilled workers, it is therefore not promising to further increase the planning orientation of the manufacturing systems and simultaneously improve the economies of scale. The primary goal should be to wholly resolve the so-called polylemma of production, which is analyzed in detail in the contribution of KLOCKE (2009) to this Festschrift.

More and more workplaces today depend on the frequent interaction of humans with visual displays. Different from earlier times, in which mostly young and technology-prone users were the major user group of computer work, more and increasingly diverse user groups, e.g. children and older workers, are confronted with electronic work. It is of central importance that electronic displays allow a trouble-free usage and provide a high working productivity. Also, technical developments and improvements necessitate the need to continuously evaluate new technologies with respect to their actual benefit for human performance.

With the advent of time sharing computer systems in the late 1960s, temporal factors came into the focus of human-computer interaction (HCI). To the present author’s knowledge, NICKERSON et al. (1968) and CARBONELL, et al. (1968) were the first authors to point to the psychological importance of involuntary delays in HCI. They concluded that computer-system originated waiting times should either be rather short, thus preventing the work flow from being interrupted, or be long enough to allow for the so-called job swapping which means executing another task during the waiting period.

The use of plastic attachments in the automotive industry is increasing steadily. Snap-fits now account for more than 20% of attachment systems used in motor vehicle assembly (HüBNER et al. 2006) and a shift from screw fastenings to snap-fits has been evident for several years now. Snap-fits have significant cost benefits over screws (STUMPP 2007). For example, integral construction methods reduce the number of assembly operations and make it possible to cover joints (e.g. in the cladding of vehicle interiors).

Zen sitting

is an Eastern way of sitting. Buddha first introduced this

lotus position

circa 500 BC. The

lotus sitting style

differs from traditional Yoga sitting postures and is characterized by symmetrical positioning of the left foot over the right thigh, and the right foot over the left thigh.

Among the classic problems of the physiology and psychology of work are the origins and consequences of fatigue (LUCZAK 1983, SCHMIDTKE 1965). Modern types of work with a high information-processing load and an intensive use of keyboards are often associated with different kinds of central and peripheral fatigue (ROHMERT & LUCZAK 1973). A signature of most varieties of fatigue is an increased variability of physiological and behavioral processes. As far as muscles are concerned, there is also a general reduction of force developed at a certain level of activation. In this chapter, I shall illustrate a rather unexpected, but observed consequence as well as an expected, but largely absent consequence of these basic phenomena. The unexpected, but observed consequences of variability are blockings. The expected, but largely absent consequences of muscle fatigue are kinematic changes.

The multidisciplinary approach of ergonomics covers conceptions aiming at the prevention of harmful effects due to chemical exposure. There are general recommendations to avoid exposure related annoyances, impairments of well-being and deterioration of physiological and psychological functions (LUCZAK & VOLPERT 1997). Methodical details about such approaches are available in surveys on behavioral neurotoxicology (BERENT & ALBERS 2005, COSTA & MANZO 1998). Standardized test batteries were developed to measure in this context especially attention, perception, cognitive and psychomotor functions. These methods were also used in considering the effects of vibration, noise, cold and light (ECHEVERRIA et al. 1991). In this text a short overview on the characteristics and some epidemiological data of a frequently used test will be presented.