FMEA and consideration of real work situations for safer design of production systems.

Production equipment designers must ensure the health and safety of future users; in this regard, they augment requirements for standardizing and controlling operator work. This contrasts with the ergonomic view of the activity, which recommends leaving operators leeway (margins for manoeuvre) in performing their task, while safeguarding their health. Following a brief analysis of design practices in the car industry, we detail how the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) approach is implemented in this sector. We then suggest an adaptation that enables designers to consider real work situations. This new protocol, namely, work situation FMEA, allows experience feedback to be used to defend the health standpoint during designer project reviews, which usually only address quality and performance issues. We subsequently illustrate the advantage of this approach using two examples of work situations at car parts manufacturers: the first from the literature and the second from an in-company industrial project.

Engaging workers in WRMSD prevention: Two interdisciplinary case studies in an activity clinic.

BACKGROUND: This paper reports on two case studies conducted by the Activity Clinic team to support the prevention of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WRMSDs) in the workplace. Research so far qualifies WRMSDs as multifactorial and organizational pathologies. It has also demonstrated that in situ clinical analysis of the work activity improves the understanding of WRMSDs and their long-term prevention. OBJECTIVE: In the two cases reported here (one in the car industry and the other among gravediggers in a large French city), the interventionist framework combined ergonomic observations, biomechanical monitoring, and a developmental methodology called Cross Self-Confrontation (CSC). The goal was to help workers and managers reflect on their work constraints, the impact of those constraints on health, and the possibility of transforming the work. METHOD: Volunteers among the workers were prompted to engage in collective re-thinking of their work based on video-recordings and monitoring of their physical activity. In the CSC dialogues, biomechanical or ergonomic quantitative representations of the work activity were transformed by the researchers and the workers into argumentation and analysis tools for understanding and prevention of WRMSDs. CSC interviews were recorded and analyzed to track the dynamics of collective elaboration--both conceptual and practical--on WRMSDs prevention. RESULTS: CSC discussions helped workers and managers transform their views on health, activity, and work constraints, and experiment with alternatives for health protection. The dialogical framework and quantitative representations were instrumental in the process of collective re-conceptualization of conflicts in the work activity and of resources for its transformation. CONCLUSION: This research demonstrates how the integration of biomechanical and ergonomic mediations in the CSC framework promotes WRMSDs prevention in the workplace. This integration supports discussions within work teams and across organizational levels on work dimensions, which may lead to alternatives supporting health.