Redesigning of a production line for ergonomic standadrs compliance. Before and after evaluation.

• Autor(a) principal: Santos , João Carlos Castro
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/14023
• topic: Mass production; Manual manufacturing; Assembly lines; Ergonomics; Produção em massa; Produção manual; Linhas de montagem; Ergonomia; Materiais e Tecnologias de Fabrico

The main objective of a production line is the manufacture of certain products in a large scale. The best way to achieve that goal is without a doubt the full automatization of the manufacturing process. By reducing the human intervention to a minimum, it is possible to eliminate various causes for variations of a production process. However, the full automatization of a certain process is not always possible or economically practicable. In these cases, there is no alternative but to resort to duly qualified operators to perform the various functions inherent to the process. In these cases, process engineering, together with industrial management and internal logistics engineering, play a key role in two equally important aspects. The first is reflected in obtaining the maximum possible income from the available resources, whether they are the available operators, equipment or materials stock. The second, which focuses more on process engineering, is to give employees all the necessary conditions in terms of safety and ergonomics to perform their tasks in the most "comfortable" way possible. These improvements generally result in increased operator performance and satisfaction, lower rates of work-related incidents and higher production volume, which ultimately translates into increased profits earned by the organization. In both aspects it is possible to use various tools (production instructions, SMED's, Poka-Yoke devices, support gauges, etc.) that allow the minimization of the causes of variance in a purely manual production process, to achieve a process as stable as possible.