Definition of safety and industrial hygiene
Safety
at work
According to Bestratén (1999), safety at work is
"the set of techniques and procedures that are designed to
eliminate or reduce the risk of accidents."
Therefore, safety
at work is concerned with addressing a number of hazards that affect
industrial accidents, such as:
- Lack
of mechanisms of protection against moving parts of machinery,
equipment and tools;
- Poor
conditions of order and cleanliness in the workplace;
To achieve safety at work, we should develop preventive
actions that fall within both general and specific rules, such as:
- The mission and vision of the company;
- The safety policies;
- Procedures at work;
- Staff training;
- Incorporation of
safety devices on machines, equipment and facilities.
Industrial
hygiene
According to Hernandez and Marti (1989), industrial
hygiene is the discipline that aims the prevention of occupational
diseases by controlling chemical, physical or biological agents in
the working environment.
The (chemical, physical or biological) agents
mentioned have effect in the workplace; not only directly for workers
who perform a particular task, but also for people from other areas
that are part of that environment. Moreover, the presence of these
agents also affects the external environment of the company like
nearby businesses, nearby communities and in general the soil, air
and water.
In order to reduce occupational risks of emerging
pollutants, three objectives are established:
Controls on the origin and source of danger;
Controls on the path between the hazard and the
worker;
Controls on the subject exposed to danger.
Productivity and industrial engineering
What
is productivity?
Applied
in an enterprise, a sector of economic activity or the economy as a
whole, productivity may be defined as an output and input relation.
The
term productivity can be used to asses or measure the extent to which
a certain output can be extracted from a given input. This may
appears simple enough in cases where both the output and the input
are tangible and can be easily measured; however, in cases where
intangibles are introduced measure of productivity can be more
difficult.
Calculation
of productivity
Productivity
can be calculated as follows:
Productivity
and industrial engineering in goods production
In
the case of goods production, the objective is the manufacturing to a
better cost, through the raw material, with productivity of the
primary resources of production: Materials, human resources and
machines. It's on these, where the action of industrial engineers
should address their efforts. Increasing productivity indexes and
reducing production costs, are fundamental tasks of an industrial
engineer.
The domain of industrial and systems engineering
Definition of
Industrial and Systems Engineering
According
with Womack and Jones (1996),
an Industrial and Systems Engineer is one who is concerned with the
design, installation, and improvement of integrated systems of
people, material, information, equipment, and energy by drawing upon
specialized knowledge and skills in the mathematical, physical, and
social sciences, together with the principles and methods of
engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate the
results to be obtained from such systems’’.
The
work of and industrial and systems engineering
But,
what kind of system is it that Industrial and Systems Engineering
work to optimize? In the context of organizations, we can say that
the ultimate system of interest is the extended enterprise.
Industrial
and system engineers must see how performance improvement in the
target subsystem (warehouse layout, work cell configuration, display
/human-equipment interface, queue design, simulation, supply chain,
etc.) serves the higher good or works to optimize the performance of
the larger system.
The
domain of industrial and systems engineering
Basically,
industrial and systems engineering works in four areas: manufacturing
systems engineering, management systems, operations research and
human factors engineering. Of course, each of these areas needs basic
knowledge of mathematics, accounting, economics, statistics,
psychology, etc.
A
simple representation of the domain of industrial and systems
engineering is shown below.
The
Industrial and systems engineering value proposition isn’t only
knowledge; it is the ability to reduce that knowledge to practice in
such a way that it produces positive business results.
