An Excel‐based program to teach students quick ergonomic risk assessment techniques with an application to an assembly system

Abstract

ABSTRACTGovernments force companies to stabilize ergonomic risk levels of the manufacturing environment and keep it below an acceptable risk level in order to prevent aftermaths. As a result, companies need more manufacturing engineers who are aware of ergonomics risk analysis. Thus, undergraduate students in the 3rd year in Industrial Engineering at Dokuz Eylül University are invited to take part in a real‐life experience. This paper introduces an Excel‐based program which is called Quick Ergonomic Assessment Techniques (QEAT); in order to support teaching students ergonomic risk assessment techniques; facilitate understanding characteristics of different techniques, and enable to compare the results of them. Three of the well‐known ergonomic risk assessment techniques are coded in QEAT and applied on an electronics company which manufactures TV. The proposed QEAT procedure is easy to apply in various manufacturing environments and is suitable to be implemented in undergraduate engineering laboratories in order to support and encourage ergonomics study. The results show that by using the combination of three techniques in QEAT, an ergonomic risk assessment which covers most of the body areas could be presented and manufacturing environment could be reanalyzed easily if it is needed due to the changes in production processes. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:489–507, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21816