WISP: Visual approach to production environment analysis

Undesirable agents in the production environment, for instance airborne contaminants, may create problems for products, production equipment and personnel. The improvement of the production enveronment is a complex task and threfore unprofitable investments in the production environment are common. VTT Automation has been involved in a project in which prodedures and tools for production environment improvement have been developed. The stepwise WISP procedure is based on visualisation of the problem with the PIMEX method, encancing motivation and information flow within the company and innovative problem solving at group meetins. PIMEX equipment combines video pictures of the work, and data measured simultaneously from the sensors detecting, for instance, the production environment. Links between problem-causing condtions and work can be analysed with the aid of video pictures on which graphical presentation of data is superimposed. The procedure has successfully been used in several companies to improve the production environment.