Ergonomic criteria in large-scale engineering design—I Management by documentation only? Formal organization vs. designers’ perceptions

Wulff, Ingrid Anette; Westgaard, Rolf H.; Rasmussen, Bente

doi:10.1016/s0003-6870(98)00029-5

Cited by 34 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Challenges include bringing human considerations into design (Wulff et al, 1999;Burns and Vicente, 1999), dealing with other ongoing organizational change initiatives (Westlander, 1995), and working through (Laitenen et al, 1998). Such challenges have prompted closer examination of the processes through which workplace interventions are implemented (Griffiths, 1999;St-Vincent et al, 2000) and clearer delineation of the context for implementation of organizational changes aimed at improving worker health (Haslam, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paddling upstream: a contextual analysis of implementation of a workplace ergonomic policy at a large newspaper

2005

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paddling upstream: a contextual analysis of implementation of a workplace ergonomic policy at a large newspaper

2005

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“…the immediately surrounding 'collegial influence' on an HFE agent's work, has been mainly concerned with following single or multiple case studies of ergonomics interventions [11][12][13], focused on implementation outcomes of Participative Ergonomics (PE) initiatives [14,15], or prescriptive [16]. It was noted in some multiple case study papers that comparisons would have been aided by some form of standardization across cases, e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human Factors Experiences in Context - Comparing Four Industrial Cases Using a Soft Systems Framework

Berlin¹

2011

TOERGJ

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Abstract:In industrial production companies, the practice of assigning responsibility for human factors and ergonomics (HFE) to specific professionals (referred to as HF agents in this paper) may take on various organizational forms. This interview study examines the extent to which HF agents are able to give input towards the design of new production systems in different industrial sectors. The present paper reports on how HF agents work in four Canadian case companies from the Automotive, Nuclear Power, Poultry and Auto parts sectors. A stratified soft-systems framework was used to guide the comparison of the four case companies regarding the HF agents' positioning in their companies and how this influences their work practices. HF agents and a cluster of 2 -3 surrounding colleagues with adjacent responsibilities were interviewed.Results showed that company context-specific factors such as procedures, collegial relations, processes and culture all heavily influence the "infrastructure" the HF agents can make use of to advance and sustain a human factors/ergonomics agenda. This includes vertical support in the company hierarchy (management support from top-down, employee acceptance from bottom-up), available tools and methods for demonstrating HFE benefits, and proceduralized accountability for HFE in projects. The companies that report positively on being able to address HFE issues proactively have HFE input integrated procedurally into new project start-ups, and the HF agent has a sign-off role. These companies have also, on a high organizational level, established linkage between HFE improvements and business objectives.

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“…Lack of HF in system design criteria can also limit the mandate for attention to HF in design. This may be aggravated by the ambiguity implicit in qualitative guidelines that are sometimes used for HF design criteria (Wulff et al 1999a, b). The simulation approach here provides unambiguous results to HF aspects in quantitative productivity terms that design engineers appear to crave (Wulff et al 2000).…”

Section: Integrating Hf Into Production Planningmentioning

confidence: 97%

Integrating human factors into discrete event simulations of parallel flow strategies

Medbo

Neumann

2009

Production Planning & Control

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This article demonstrates an approach to integrating human factors (HF) into a discrete event simulation (DES) study of semi-parallelised production strategies. Operationalised HF included operators' autonomy at work, a known workplace health factor; and reduced operator capability, a factor for new or injured operators. These HF were tested in scenarios of serial flow and two degrees of semi-parallelised flow. The parallel production systems demonstrated better productivity than serial flow in all conditions tested and were less affected by either of the HF tested. It is concluded that HF can be integrated into DES which facilitates early consideration of operator risk and system vulnerabilities. Parallel production approaches, although less common in practice, appear to have advantages over serial flow in terms of productivity, injury risk and the accommodation of operators with temporarily reduced capacity. Further research should expand the range and test the validity of HF integrated into DES modelling procedures.

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Ergonomic criteria in large-scale engineering design—I Management by documentation only? Formal organization vs. designers’ perceptions

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Paddling upstream: a contextual analysis of implementation of a workplace ergonomic policy at a large newspaper

Paddling upstream: a contextual analysis of implementation of a workplace ergonomic policy at a large newspaper

Human Factors Experiences in Context - Comparing Four Industrial Cases Using a Soft Systems Framework

Integrating human factors into discrete event simulations of parallel flow strategies

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