Assembly Ergonomics filters for prevention of injury risk operations at Ford Motor Company

The role of ergonomics in the manufacturing workplace and on the assembly line floor is a critical issue that needs to be addressed in order to prevent workplace injuries and avoid work actions that may lead to long-term medical problems for the workers. At Ford, we have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) technology into our manufacturing process planning system in order to identify potential ergonomics issues before the work instructions are sent to the assembly plants. However, the process of allocating the work to specific operators at the assembly plant can still lead to potential ergonomic concerns even if the initial work process was ergonomically acceptable. This can happen through the assignment of different work operations to a single operator that in combination may cause an ergonomic issue. In addition, changes to the line speed or product mix can also produce an ergonomically unsafe condition for a given operator. Manual analysis of each worker's work allocation at a plant is a time consuming task that must be repeated when the operating conditions change, In this paper, we describe an automated solution we have developed at Ford to automatically analyze each operator's potential ergonomics concerns based on the current manufacturing parameters at the plant. This system has been integrated into the allocations planning tool (APT) and is in use throughout Ford's assembly plants around the world.