Productivity improvement through a work study with ergonomic risk assessment: A case study of a high-voltage line distribution operation

Abstract

The operation of a high-voltage distribution system is risky to workers in many respects, as it involves long hours of work and the need for postures that affect employees’ health, causing performance degradation. The aim of this research is to improve these aspects by studying the tasks, time required, and postures. This is combined with an ergonomic risk assessment in which we use rapid entire body assessment (REBA) to analyze the risk arising from employees’ postures when working with high-voltage distribution lines with mobile elevating work platforms (MEWPs). We examine 10 processes with the aim of increasing productivity and reducing the ergonomic impact on employee health. The results indicate that problems are caused by the equipment used and the work methods, which cause delays. In addition, most of the postures also involved ergonomic risk at the high to medium level. We therefore introduced improvements by modifying and designing equipment to make it suitable for operation according to the ECRS principles, established postures that posed the least risk, and verified that this improvement did not cause further impact. Following this, the Digital Human Model (DHM) was used with the CATIA V5 program to improve the working methods. After the improvement, the overall working time was reduced by 16.00%, a maximum efficiency increase of 31.85% was found, and the ergonomic risk at the very high to high level was reduced by 87.24%.