BACKGROUND: Lean Production Systems (LPS) have become very popular
among manufacturing industries, services and large commercial areas. A LPS
must develop and consider a set of work features to bring compatibility with
workplace ergonomics, namely at a muscular, cognitive and emotional demands
level.
OBJECTIVE: Identify the most relevant impacts of the adoption of
LPS from the ergonomics point of view and summarizes some possible drawbacks
for workplace ergonomics due to a flawed application of the LPS. The impacts
identified are focused in four dimensions: work pace, intensity and load;
worker motivation, satisfaction and stress; autonomy and participation; and
health outcome. This paper also discusses the influence that the work
organization model has on workplace ergonomics and on the waste elimination
previewed by LPS.
METHODS: Literature review focused LPS and its impact on
occupational ergonomics conditions, as well as on the Health and Safety of
workers. The main focus of this research is on LPS implementations in
industrial environments and mainly in manufacturing industry workplaces.
This is followed by a discussion including the authors' experience (and
previous research).
RESULTS: From the reviewed literature it seems that there is no
consensus on how Lean principles affect the workplace ergonomics since most
authors found positive (advantages) and negative (disadvantages) impacts.
CONCLUSIONS: The negative impacts or disadvantages of LPS
implementations reviewed may result from the misunderstanding of the Lean
principles. Possibly, they also happen due to partial Lean implementations
(when only one or two tools were implemented) that may be effective in a
specific work context but not suitable to all possible situations as the
principles of LPS should not lead, by definition, to any of the reported
drawbacks in terms of workplace ergonomics.
