An Engineering Approach to Storage and Access in High Priority Scenarios

Abstract

Over the past few years, an extensive amount of research has been done in the field of Human Factors. Applications range from the design of day-to-day products like cell phones to the design and development of safety-critical systems like flight displays. The highly critical aviation industry has shown time and again the importance of human-centered approach in developing systems for the safety of those operating it and the passengers. Similarly, other safety-critical industries like law enforcement have been seen to incorporate human factors in the design of weapons and exoskeletons aimed at adapting to humans and making their unit stronger. Many manufacturing firms have begun to see the importance of proper work postures for their employees to avoid musculoskeletal disorders and the financial and regulatory implications of not following proper work ethics that take care of employees’ health. Further, many organizations have started to consider team dynamics in their operations understanding the importance of healthy interaction among the employees and between employees and the management. However, there are a very few references to any studies or organizational practices that draw a connection between human performance and human-centric re-design of work places, with most designs being limited to work desks and activity-based working (ABW) work spaces. This paper focuses on the organizational engineering of storage spaces to enable easy location and retrieval of equipment, thus supporting the time-critical nature of operations at a miscellaneous storage room at the Story County Sheriff’s Office. Experiments were carried out using two familiar scenarios both before and after the redesign of the storage room. A significant improvement in the performance of the operator was observed after the redesign, as could be seen by the reduction in time taken to identify and retrieve equipment and the qualitative survey that was obtained at the end of the experiment. The wasted time was translated to a cost and the newly designed storage design saved a significant amount of money spent on actions that precluded efficient accomplishment of tasks, something that could have been used by the Sheriff’s office to purchase equipment for normal operation of the office. The results suggested such interventions in different sectors that have similar high-priority operations. The results of the study indicates that there is a need for the industry to extend research towards this field that we name “organization engineering”.