How Can Manufacturing Safety Keep Pace with Technology?

Leveraging Science and Engineering to Put Worker Safety First

When setting up a factory to produce a new technology, a major battery manufacturer needed to understand how new processes would impact worker safety. Ģ��tv provided a comprehensive assessment that went beyond basics to promote and tailor safe work practices — helping our client create one of the largest scale operations of its type.

The Challenge

When processes begin expanding rapidly, what perspectives are needed to identify and address risks to employees? For our manufacturing client, the question was how to implement innovation while ensuring new processes didn't have an adverse impact on worker safety. With thousands of employees filling our client's plant every day, our experts provided a detailed factory assessment to set operations up for success.

EXPONENT's Multidisciplinary Solution

Ģ��tv assembled a team spanning engineering, thermal sciences, health sciences, and human factors and occupational safety to study every aspect of our client's process, from the science itself to the machines deployed and employee procedures.

To go beyond the basics, our team married occupational safety expertise with human factors and behavioral science to ensure processes that looked sensible on paper were realistic once they involved people interacting with systems, each other, and their environments.

Our team helped the client develop a guidebook of nearly 50 safe work instructions outlining proper procedures, paying special attention to materials handling and sources of heat and dust that could pose unique risks to the plant and its personnel.

- Experts in factory worker safety inspected the plant and noted areas of concern. While the client was in solid compliance with OHSA requirements, these were only the starting point for deeper analysis focused on gaps between "requirements" and "standard of care."
- Leveraging a human factors viewpoint, our team surveyed whether new procedures made sense in the real world. Experience from hundreds of accident investigations shows this is a common point of failure.
- We paid special attention to the movement of materials across the entire facility, assessing every transfer and related processes, through questions such as, what are the properties of the material being transferred? How are they being transferred — from 18-wheelers or factory trucks? Using forklifts? Power jacks? Manual or assisted?

Ģ��tv's Impact

Our multidisciplinary team produced a guidebook of nearly 50 "work instructions" outlining proper procedures, paying special attention to materials handling and sources of heat and dust that pose unique risks to the plant and its personnel.

The plant has been operating at a high level of safety and efficiency for more than two years, representing one of the largest-scale operations of its type on the planet. Ģ��tv helped fill gaps in safety processes and programs arising from the client's cutting-edge innovation while raising its standard of employee care.

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