Ergonomic intervention in a Portuguese textile company to achieve Lean principles

Abstract

"Doing more with less" by eliminating wastes to reduce costs and increase productivity is one of the current goals pursued by the companies. To achieve this, some of them appeal to the Lean principles and its tools. "Less" means less material, less resources, less inventories and less human effort. To reduce the human effort, first of all, it is important to assess the workers conditions. Ergonomic tools could be used to diagnose, evaluate and measure the work conditions before and after Lean implementation. Accordingly, this paper presents part of a work realized in a Portuguese Textile Company that includes the use of an ergonomic tool, the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), to identify postures with risk of musculoskeletal injuries. Identified the risk situations, some improvements in the workstations were proposed to the company to assure workers good working conditions. This ergonomic assessment was supported by the use of a methodology developed to implement Lean Production in the Portuguese Textile and Clothing Industry. The paper contains a brief overview on the companies' needs of a Lean Production implementation and the role of Ergonomics in this implementation. One assessment tool, REBA, was used in a textile company to assess postures in workstations. The analysis of the results is presented, including the action levels calculated for workstations based on the final REBA scores. Some solutions were proposed to improve the ergonomic working conditions and some advice was given for the urgent need to implement solutions to the risk situations encountered.