اثربخشی هزینه از طراحی مجدد ارگونومیک مادربرد الکترونیکی

A case study to illustrate the cost effectiveness of ergonomic redesign of electronic motherboard was presented. The factory was running at a loss due to the high costs of rejects and poor quality and productivity. Subjective assessments and direct observations were made on the factory. Investigation revealed that due to motherboard design errors, the machine had difficulty in placing integrated circuits onto the pads, the operators had much difficulty in manual soldering certain components and much unproductive manual cleaning (MC) was required. Consequently, there were high rejects and occupational health and safety (OHS) problems, such as, boredom and work discomfort. Also, much labour and machine costs were spent on repairs. The motherboard was redesigned to correct the design errors, to allow more components to be machine soldered and to reduce MC. This eliminated rejects, reduced repairs, saved US $581,495/year and improved operators’ OHS. The customer also saved US $142,105/year on loss of business

One of the major debates on the use of ergonomics in the factories in industrially developing countries (IDCs) is whether it is cost effective or not. Most of these factories are already facing great difficulty in surviving the competitive world market; hence, they cannot afford to introduce ergonomics to improve the working conditions of their workers. This is because they think that ergonomics is expenditure rather than an investment. This trend of thought is more common amongst the managers in IDCs, possibly because ergonomics is still very new to them (Sen (1984) and Sen (1998); O’Neill, 2000). There were many ergonomic studies conducted in Industrially Advanced Countries (IACs) that had proven the cost effectiveness of ergonomics. To name a few, Marcotte and Kessler (1997) did a 6-year study on a games manufacturing company and found that application of ergonomics to product design and manufacturing process had saved over US $1 million in direct manufacturing cost. Helander and Burri (1995) presented four case studies of ergonomics applied to electronic manufacturing which resulted in cost savings of approximately US $130 million. Abrahamsson (2000) did an ergonomic study on a Swedish steel factory to improve the quality, productivity, working environment and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) of the workers; and found that the study yielded a good profit. However, a very few cost effective studies had been conducted in IDCs, e.g. Sen and Yeow (1999) and Yeow and Sen (1999a), Yeow and Sen (1999b) and Yeow and Sen (2000) conducted four studies of ergonomic interventions on an electronic manufacturing factory in an IDC, which had saved approximately US $0.3 million/year on rejection costs and improved quality, productivity and OHS. To our knowledge, there has been no study conducted so far on the cost effectiveness of ergonomic redesign of electronic motherboard. For this reason, the present research undertook to investigate the cost effectiveness of the ergonomic redesign of electronic motherboard in a computer peripheral manufacturing factory, located in Malaysia, an IDC. The brief preliminary findings of this research were presented by Sen and Yeow (2001). The current paper presents the final findings.

The ergonomic redesign of the electronic motherboard presented in the present study was very cost effective. This was shown in the tremendous savings in the costs of high rejects, poor quality and low productivity; the low-cost redesign and the immense profits for both the customer and the factory. Besides, it improved the working conditions of the workers through the elimination of psycho-physiological problems, such as, boredom, discouragement, discomfort and tiredness. Therefore, it is recommended that electronic industries in IDCs should adopt ergonomic redesign if their products are not ergonomically designed for manufacturing, with the hope of getting huge returns from its cost effectiveness. However, the management's mindset that ergonomics is expenditure has to be changed first. Educational institutions and ergonomic societies, to take up the challenge to educate and convince the management through more case studies, seminars, conferences and journal publications.