Job design for manual fish processing process Improvement

Abstract

This paper presents the development and experimental of the Job Design and Ergonomic principles to a local manual fish processing factory in fish trimming, fish de-scaling and fish gutting processes for worker performance improvement. The fish processing factory experimented in this research is in one of the provinces next to the sea in southern Thailand, namely Pattani, where the leading economy industry of this province are seafood processing and manufacturing. However, because most of the local processing factories in this province are still manually processing the aquatic products, they are affected by more stringent regulation of migrant workers implemented by the Thai government in response to the yellow card issued to Thailand for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing practices (IUU) by the European Union. Although in early 2019 this yellow card was lifted, the consequences of migrant workers' regulations reduce the number of migrant workers specifically in this factory. It is leaving the factory with the local workers as the only option, which have lower performance comparing to the migrant workers, for the factory. Therefore, worker performance improvement is necessary in order to increase the factory capacity to the desired level in which this research aims to demonstrate. Since these manual processes involve human interactions, this paper consists of workspace adjustments and tool adjustments in fish processing areas following the Job Design and Ergonomics guidebooks considering all dimensions of manual work facilitation in workspace and tools to enhance worker capabilities. The results demonstrate that the implementation of workspace and tool adjustments in the fish processing area of the factory following Job Design and Ergonomic principles can deliver a satisfactory result in worker performance improvement. It is thereby relieving worker fatigue during the day, increasing and stabilizing local workers' productivity level, increasing the factory capacity, and increasing the profitability of this local manual fish processing factory.