Analysis of occupational safety and health of workers by implementing ergonomic based kitting assembly system

Success of any industry depends on its quality, quantity of production and delivery time of the product to the customer. Therefore industries must develop and implement new management philosophies like lean, agile, kitting manufacturing and concurrent engineering, etc. This paper deals with a study on the impact of ergonomic based kitting assembly system on occupational safety and health of workers in an automobile industry. Kitting production is most widely used in industries that are assembly-oriented or having a high amount of repetitive human processes. Kitting assembly reduces work space requirement, operator walking distance and time, work in process inventory. For these kinds of companies, improved systems can eliminate significant levels of waste or inefficiency. So, in this paper an overall analysis was carried out to minimise the wastages and to improve the efficiency in an assembly line. Here, data collection was carried out as follows: interviews with managers and supervisors, safety specialists, safety engineer, workers, in order to know their views on both the negative and positive impacts of Kitting assembly system. Questionnaire are aimed at assessing their views on the current working conditions and also aimed at assessing their views on the differences between the conventional assembly system and the new ergonomics based kitting assembly system. The result shows that a significant increase in overall working condition of the industry which in turn led to the increase in the productivity. Also, factor analysis is carried out to group some important criteria into factors for conducting future analysis with worker to evaluate the ergonomic level of workers.