What-if Analysis 101

Imagine you’ve conducted an ergonomic assessment and you’ve found that the job task you analyzed is outside of recommended guidelines and changes should be made.

At this stage in the ergonomic improvement process, you know you’re working on a job task with ergonomic risk factors present. The job task has a high priority score and is at the top of the ergonomic opportunity list. It’s time to analyze everything you know about the job task and plan the improvement project.

The question you must now answer is: what workplace improvements can we make to lower risk enough to be within recommended guidelines?

The answer to this question isn’t always obvious. There are many variables that impact the score of ergonomic assessment tools, and it isn’t always apparent which workplace changes would make the greatest impact when trying to lower risk.

What if we reduced the weight of the object being lifted by 10 pounds? What if we moved the work closer to the worker by 8 inches? What if we could do both?

Sometimes even when you think you have the best solution figured out, it can’t be implemented because of an engineering issue, budget constraints, or a number of other reasons why the solution isn’t feasible. What then?

These are some of the questions you’ll need to answer in order to determine the best solution moving forward.

Conducting a thorough “what-if analysis” empowers you as a decision maker to understand the impact of each improvement scenario you and your ergonomics team come up with. You should know exactly how each solution will impact the risk in the job.

Conducting what-if analysis for ergonomic improvement projects

The What-If Analysis tool inside the ErgoPlus Platform makes what-if analysis easy. See the video below for an example of what you can do.