Risk Assessment in Manual Material Handling of an Edible Oil Company

Abstract

The process of Shifting material manually has the potential for injury to employees. The purpose of this study is to assess and analyze the injury risk level in manual handling activity, as well as to improve the condition. The observed manual material handling activity is truck loading. This activity was analyzed using different software such as NIOSH equation, Rapid Entire Body Assessment, and compression force using 3DSSPP software as well as Nordic body map questionnaire was used to identify body discomfort level. In this study 5 male truck loading operators were taken as subjects, they are loading boxes from stacking area to truck manually. The task involved small repetitive movement while handling material, due to this the load man has faced work related musculoskeletal problems. The Nordic questionnaire is spread among the workers for collecting data, after collecting all information sorted out and analyzes the body parts using above software. The outcome shows that most of the workers who carry out activities have a high level of risk with the score of REBA exceeds points 12 risk is very high, need immediate changes required to improve the task , Literature survey indicates the lifting index should not be in more than 1, but the value obtained is 7.591 the job is more dangerous and stressful . Compression force exceeds the actual limit of 3400, but in this manual handling having compression force is 3408. When the Nordic body mapping method the major discomfort was found in the body parts such as Lower back, Forearm, upper arm. Based on the suggestion conveyor system is introduced and we re assess risk level of the body parts and the result shows that the risk level decreased up to 50 . Therefore replacing manual handling system with the conveyor system with reduces the lower back pain. Mohamed Ismail. S | Muthukumar. K "Risk Assessment in Manual Material Handling of an Edible Oil Company" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-3 | Issue-3 , April 2019, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd23112.pdf