Ergonomics important toworkplace safety,
Yamaha’s Ashley Pearce tells Coweta County Safety Council
Ergonomics, the applied science concerned with people’s work environment, was the topic of the July 21, 2015 meeting of the Coweta County Safety Council. The Safety Council was created under the auspices of the Chamber and has the motto “Creating the Safest County in America.”
Ergonomics is “not just a marketing word,” said Ashley Pearce, a safety engineer at Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corp. in Newnan. She said she’s seen the word “ergonomic” applied to everything from hand soap dispensers to chairs, but ergonomics is not simply buying the right tool but rather the scientific study of humans and the systems they work in, or as she likes to put it, “fitting the task to the person.”
The two branches of ergonomics are physical ergonomics, which focuses on the physical environment, and cognitive ergonomics, which applies to such things aswhether to capitalizewords in signs, the contrast between colors, and how best to display a sign so someone knows it applies to the shelf above and not below.
The branch of physical ergonomics, Pearce said, is concerned with the body’s musculoskeletal system.Why should businesses be concerned about ergonomics? U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that in 2013, strains and sprains were among the leading injuries requiring employees to take days away from work, and musculoskeletal disorders accounted for 33 percent of allinjury and illness cases in the workplace in 2013.
Pearce discussed the three ergonomics risk factors—force, posture and motion—and noted that ergonomists have studied everything from the range of motion of each joint in the body to precisely how much picking up or pulling with the fingers can safely be done.
Some ergonomics topics are familiar to people simply because of what they’ve learned in everyday life, Pearce noted. Just as a bent water hose restricts water flow, a posture sustained for a long time can also reduce blood flow, she said. She noted that today, many people are aware they should stretch while on an airplane instead of sitting in one position for too long and restricting the blood flow.
To determine the risk factor of a specific job in the workplace, she said, ergonomists may consult sources such as the Ergonomics Center of North Carolina, consultants like Humantech, Auburn University engineersand private consultants.
In college, Pearce worked with the American Industrial Hygiene Association, and she recommends AIHA’s “absolutely free tool,” the Ergo Easy Tool.This assessment tool helps companies to identify at a higher level where the risk is for a particular job.
She also gave those at the Safety Council meeting brochures showing how Yamaha using the Ergo Easy Tool to reduce the risk for one of its own jobs, installing the cargo bed in the Yamaha Viking. A study showed that Yamaha workers on this job had a high risk of injury in the areas of shoulders, hands/wrists, elbows and lifting. All the risk was related to posture and force, and the overall score was 85, making that a high risk job. Welding department team members worked together to find a new way to load the cargo bed, eliminating the lifting and bringing the overall risk factor for that job down to 50, making it a moderate risk job instead of a high risk job.
Pearce said that each year, the internationally recognized Ergo Cup competition is held to honor the “most impactful ergonomic improvement” by companies in five categories of competition. At the most recent conference, she said, a team from Yamaha attended and got to share how they used their ergonomic improvements to reduce employee discomfort, reduce employee turnover, reduce over staffing and over cycle time, and save the company more than $124,000 in production costs as well as more than $2,000 in costs associated with employee turnover.
If you or your business would like to learn more about the Coweta County Safety Council, e-mail Michael Lake, chair, at .
###
Cutline:
Ashley Pearce, safety engineer at Yamaha Motor Manufacturing Corp., was the speaker for the July meeting of the Coweta County Safety Council. At left is Michael Lake of KCMA Corporation, chair of the Safety Council.