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| 2006 Global Citizenship News & Events |
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Ergo Days: Sharing The Pain – and Eliminating It
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| During the Dubuque Works' Ergo Days, design engineers wielded the tools while assemblers observed and offered pointers. |
(August 26, 2005) – Design engineers at the John Deere Dubuque (Iowa) Works recently had the chance to walk in the shoes of the wage employees who will assemble the new vehicle they're designing. And sometimes, it hurt.
Feeling that pain, and eliminating it, were exactly what Dubuque's first Ergo Days were all about. The three-day event, a joint effort between the union shop committee and management, was conceived to address ergonomic problems that employees might encounter while building the new J-Series backhoe loader, which is scheduled to start production in 2007.
Typically, ergonomic principles are used to address operator comfort in vehicles. Using them in the design phase, on a scale like this, to improve the working environment of assemblers, was a first-time event for the factory.
Bethany Noyes, an ergo process engineer at the Dubuque factory, likes to use Confucius' quote – 'I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand' – to explain the logic behind Ergo Days. "We wanted to get the design engineers on the factory floor to gain first-hand experience, rather than getting indirect feedback from assemblers via manufacturing engineers," she said. "It was a good way to get the communication going directly between design engineers and assemblers."
For the event, nineteen engineers paired off with nineteen assemblers, wielding tools and working muscles unaccustomed to physical labor. Whenever a pair identified a potential problem, they completed an issue card and brainstormed an on-the-spot solution.
The result? The engineers and assemblers generated more than 100 issue cards during the event. Unresolved issues will be addressed by the design engineers, assembly engineers and the factory's continuous improvement representatives.
The event proved so successful that the factory's crawlers and skid steers divisions have asked to duplicate it. For the assemblers, it was a welcome opportunity to share their discomfort and eliminate it.
"Some of our long-time employees asked us, 'Why didn't you do this 25 years ago?'" Noyes said. "Now some of the assemblers want to know when they can shadow the engineers."
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