Workplace improvement strategy by pimex - WISP

Airborne contaminants or other hazardous agents or energies in the production environment create risks to personnel and therefore, need for workplace improvements are many times urgent, especially in small and medium size enterprises (SME). That fact is normally well known by the staff as well as the managers of the company. The knowledge in how an internal work best shall be organised with the intention to seek solutions on the problems is however missing. Concerning health hazards from chemical or physi-cal exposure are the companies poor in utilising simple, easily accessible and many times economical possibilities to control exposure. In this project has a procedure that gives the companies better possibilities to control health hazards more efficiently in the workplace been developed. The procedure has been developed and tested in nine companies. The procedure involves the following steps;1) a working group is formed and goal is decided. 2) visualisation methods are used to identify the variation in exposure. The results are discussed directly on the workplace. 3) after a few weeks the working group meets again. The group uses the further analysed results as the base for an idea generation meeting. The results of the discussions will form the base for decisions regarding different control measures, evaluation and follow-up of the results. The used visualisation tools contribute strongly to motivate the workers and to give them necessary knowledge to actively take part in searching for solutions on their problems. Examples showed that it was possible to reduce the exposure more than 90% only by a more effective utilisation of necessary prerequisites that already existed in the workplace. The developed WISP procedure has proved to be effective directly or after minor adjustments.