Modeling & Simulation for workplaces analysis in the leather industry

In this paper the authors analyze some workplaces of a manufacturing plant devoted to support hand-crafted production of leather items. Workers' satisfaction and safety have been improved by using ergonomic analysis together with modeling and simulation. A three dimensional environment (developed by using a simulation software package) recreates the real workpalce. The software used is eM-Workplace (by Tecnomatix Technologies) that integrates some ergonomic methodologies for designing and analyzing manufacturing workplaces. Finally the research work presents an ergonomically designed workstation that allows to prevent workers' wrong posture, reduce overload operations during the manufacturing process and give more flexibility to the system in terms of items mixture. This last aspect plays an important role for satisfying the more and more specific requirements of the final customers.