Improving Productivity and Reducing Accidents using Ergonomic Approach

The depressing economic situation of things in our country lead to the carrying out of this research as the bad economy can be responsible for low productivity in soft packaging industry. State of the art the industrial success mainly depends on the delivery, quality and uptime. The industry where this study has been doneis engaged in the processing and manufacturing, flexible packaging solutions. This unit is engaged in printing required content on plain foils. In order to achieve this industry should implement new techniques which will increase the quality, productivity and decrease worker fatigue. Ergonomics is one such technique. The assessment is based on NIOSH calculation for lifting and the general survey among 8 workers for a month in industry. This study is on application of ergonomics in reducing musculoskeletal disorders, improving the quality of work system design and increasing productivity. Various factors which may cause injury at work station were checked out. The existing workstation design was studied and suggestion was given to improvise the method for productivity by reducing wristand shoulderinjury and fatigue. In this study some causes which were responsible for low productivity such as inappropriate performance of machines and injuries to workers, keeping these facts in mind ergonomic approach were used to overcome these problems. The questionnaire for safety and health survey has been taken up from OSHA Nova Scott that for ergonomic survey has been taken up from NIOSH publication. In this study injury has been reduced to a great extent by conducting training and productivity has been improved by changing current outer diameter of rolls from 450 mm to 650 mm. It has been concluded by these implementations that the along with these main goals company also have reduced the amount of waste material from 5 - 7 % to 2 - 4% and storage space also reduced. Quality and machine performance was improved due to continuous run of machine in lesser breaks.