Ergonomics Job Analysis

1622 Words7 Pages
IME 549 – Industrial Ergonomics Ergonomics Job Analysis 5/8/2013 Introduction: For municipality water treatment plants, “preppers” need to assemble several pieces of membrane in order to prepare them for the next operation. In doing so, musculoskeletal disorders can be obtained. Ergonomic job analyses are a useful tool in these work settings to help prevent Work Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WRMSD) and lost workdays. Completing such analyses can help employees work settings be better designed to reduce stress and fatigue on their bodies. Doing so will lead to less workdays lost, which reduces costs for the company, and could lead to improved productivity. A video from a municipality water treatment plant showing the tasks required along with the companies’ OSHA 300 logs, body discomfort surveys, and an employee questionnaires were analyzed in order to give our group first-hand experience in carrying out such an analysis, as well as how to develop control strategies to improve the work setting. Methods: The process taken to complete this job analysis is as follows. The first step was to look at the OSHA 300 log to see if any WMSDs were recorded. Seeing that injuries had occurred, this particular job setting was a good candidate for an ergonomic job analysis. The next step could be to either look at the employee discomfort surveys or to conduct the actual job analysis. Choosing to do the analysis before viewing the employee surveys helped to prevent observations from being biased and only focused on what risks the employees had mentioned. Identifying the job tasks, risk factors present with each job task, and root cause of each factor in the provided video was the method used for analysis. The job tasks were chronologically recorded after viewing the video, after which, the Washington State Ergonomics Checklist was used to identify any

More about Ergonomics Job Analysis

Open Document