Improving the Workplace
visitors
since June 9, 1997
- Introduction
- The optical microscope can be found in almost every
laboratory in the world. It is also the one instrument in
those laboratories that causes more physical harm to its
long-term users than any other. The debilitating injuries it
inflicts can be eliminated by redesigning the microscope so
that it can be operated from a personal computer. This paper
will explore some of the compelling reasons for performing
such a conversion. This paper is not about automation; it is
simply about making people's jobs easier and safer.
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- Why Improve the Workplace?
- Improving the workplace to make a job easier yields some
very beneficial results -- increased profitability for the
business owners and improved welfare of the employees. To
accomplish this improvement requires addressing the 2
components that comprise the workplace: people and their
working environment.
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- People
- In order to assure profitability, a business needs to
employ the best people possible in terms of attitude,
aptitude and education. Success requires people who can work
together to meet common goals. And, their first goal is to
provide a marketable product or service for less cost than
expenses. Statistically, finding the best employee requires
a large pool of candidates. For example, if one selects the
best from a population of 10, a good employee may be found,
but if one searches a population of 10,000, the best will
certainly be "world class", the best-of-the-best.
To maximize the size of the pool, a business must search for
the best without concern for candidates' ancestry, religious
affiliation, or need for a wheel chair for personal
mobility. The only concern should be to maximize the pool to
increase the probability of finding the very best employee
possible. When building a competitive workforce, a
business must focus its attention on the abilities of the
potential employee, and on nothing else.
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- Environment
- Next we have to address the environment into which we
place the employees. The creative mind requires a nurturing
environment to reach its potential, and that means
stress-free accommodations, such as comfortable chairs,
proper lighting, clean air and appropriate tools (i.e.
computers and communication equipment). All of these
accommodating components can be considered "assistive
technology" -- that is, they provide what the employees
need in order to maximize their productivity. There are
people in the pool who may require other accommodations such
as more sophisticated tool interfaces. But, as for all
employees, the assistive technology provided is based on
their particular needs in order to maximize the benefits a
business can derive from their abilities. A
non-accommodating environment reduces the size of the
candidate pool by excluding qualified people from competing
for the job for non-job related reasons. An unnecessarily
constrained candidate pool will not provide the
best-of-the-best employees!
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- A Harmful Environment
- Researcher after researcher has found that microscopists
are harmed by their working conditions at an alarming rate1.
One author made some recommendations to minimize the
discomfort as far back as 18352, a more
contemporary researcher found 80% of microscopists
frequently experience significant pain3, another
found an OSHA rate of 194, and yet another
estimated the average career life span of microscopists at 5
to 10 years5. What researchers have found is that
people who spend their day at the eyepieces of a microscope
can expect strained eyes, and sore wrists, elbows, neck and
back. Consequently, industries are unable to take
advantage of the expertise of their most experienced
workers, just as they reach their most productive level, as
a direct consequence of the environment they place them in.
But it doesn't have to be that way!
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- The Fix
- This situation can be alleviated by employing the same
high-tech approach to redesigning the workplace as was used
to develop the business processes. A good understanding of
the challenge can be achieved by reviewing the operation of
the optical microscope. The user must sit in a rigid
position with eyes focused on a distant image through
binocular eyepieces while using his/her hands to turn the
focus knob, move the sample, adjust the illumination, and
change the magnification. This becomes a very challenging
set of physical requirements, yet the physical operation of
the microscope has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual
analytical work being performed. In fact, the operation
doesn't have to be physical at all. Manipulation of all of
the microscope's manual controls can be accomplished using a
personal computer based system and state-of-the-art motion
control technology. And off- the-shelf electronic video
imaging technology can be utilized to transmit the magnified
image to the personal computer monitor. By fully-integrating
these functions, we have a microscope operable from an
office desk located outside of any exclusionary space. By
employing a second personal computer and interconnecting the
2 in a host/remote configuration, the microscope can be
operated from another building, or even another state.
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- Benefits
- Improving the tool-operator interface provides several
advantages. First, we eliminate the constant rearrangement
of work assignments which is required to minimize the time
any one worker has to spend peering through the eyepieces of
a microscope. Now one person can spend an entire day, every
day, at a microscope. Economy of scale principles dictates
an improved productivity when each person can specialize in
a single activity. Second, an improved interface provides
direct productivity improvement. As a result, the business
has to employ fewer people to perform the same amount of
work. And there is a third important advantage: those who
spend all day, every day in a chair -- qualified people with
mobility impairments -- are now part of the prospective
employee pool. By focusing on their abilities, it
becomes apparent that performing the job of a microscopist,
using appropriately designed interfaces6, is
truly serendipitous. A person with quadriplegia can work as
productively as anyone else, and recruiting intelligent,
career-minded people with limited mobility for these
positions provides a new source of employees for businesses
while giving some well- motivated people access to high-tech
careers.
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- Financial Assessment
- Consider the financial benefits of this approach applied
to a hypothetical semiconductor wafer fabrication facility.
For sake of explanation, assume a 5 day/week, 3 shift/day
manufacturing facility with a total operating cost of
$75/hour/employee. It will be left to the reader to alter
these assumptions for their particular environment, as
appropriate.
With the current state of the art in automated wafer
handling, one can load and unload practically any tool
without human interaction. Thus a load/unload event can be
initiated and control of all of the operations of a
microscope can be handled from a remote location using a
host/remote personal computer hookup. Fully-integrated,
computer-controlled microscopes are available for around
$52,0007. Adding a remote personal computer with
a 25Mbps link to control the host personal computer adds
about $3,000. Consider that an employer loses the
productivity of an employee for at least 60 minutes a day
while the employee is entering and leaving a clean room. At
the burden rate of $75/hour, this is a loss of $18,900 per
year. With 3 shifts per day, the total cost of lost employee
time would be $56,700 per inspection station. The cost of an
integrated inspection station with remote control would be
$55,000, and therefore the return on the investment is
only about 1 year. Annual savings each following year
would accumulate at $56,700 per year per inspection station.
More importantly, if the interface to an optical
microscope can be redesigned to provide seamless remote
control, then the interfaces of many other tools can also be
redesigned using the appropriate technology. Multiply the
annual savings of a single inspection station by the number
of tools that can be operated remotely and the number
quickly becomes very significant. Add the impact of removing
contamination sources (people) from the cleanroom and the
savings grow even larger.
- Summary
- A tool that is relatively difficult to use has been
redesigned to allow for personal computer control. As a
result, businesses can alter their facilities to move
employees out of exclusionary environments, improve the
efficiency of their operations, and extend their search for
the employees they need to fuel their growth8 to
a large and underutilized population of people. The
participating enterprise will realize a return of 100% of
the initial investment in approximately 12 months.
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- Conclusion
- This paper has presented a model based on the application
of state-of-the-art technology to redesign a production tool
so that it causes no harm to its user and is accessible to
people in wheel chairs. The improved interface practically
eliminates the physical stress from operating a tool that
has an extensive history of causing harm to its users. It
reduces employee turn-over, increases productivity, and
allows businesses to remove their workers from restricted
access areas. And now there is a population of hundreds of
thousands to draw from to find the people needed to staff
the growth in mission-critical positions. Certainly, if this
can be accomplished with one tool, it can be done for a host
of other tools, and improve business processes and people's
lives at the same time.
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- References:
-
- Research & Development, June 1995, feature article
-- Fabs Strain to Prevent Work- Related Injuries, Don
Lassiter
- Treatise On Optics, Second American Edition -
Philadelphia, 1835, Sir David Brewster
- USA Microscopy & Analysis, July 1993, Article:
Applying Ergonomics to Improve Microscopy Work, Helen
Haines and Lynn McAtamney.
- Applied Ergonomics 1991 - 22.1, 36-42 Article:
Planning and Implementation of Microscope Work, M.G.
Helander, E.J. Grossmith and P. Prabhu.
- ASCT News (American Society for Cytotechnology) Number
3, 1990 Article: The Scoop on Scopes, Roberta M Goodell,
Editor.
- The International Academy of Cytology, Reference
25:195-196, 1981, letters to the Editor, Max Robinowitz,
M.D., Gunther F. Bahr, M.D. F.I.A.C., Cecil H. Fox,
Ph.D. (Armed Forces Institute of Pathology)
- TriTek Corp. , 5263 Stewart Road, Sumerduck, VA 22742
(540) 439-3690, (http://www.tritekcorp.com)
- Washington Post, May 22, 1997,"In The Chips Now,
But Maybe Not Later", Peter Behr
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- The Author
- Rex Hoover is the President of the TriTek Corporation.
Prior to the founding of TriTek, he spent 25 years with IBM
where he held engineering and management positions in
semiconductor process development and manufacturing at IBM
facilities in New York and Virginia. He gained insight into
the working conditions of microscopists while managing the
component failure analysis laboratory in Virginia in support
of a DRAM manufacturing line.
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