Integrity, Reliability and Failure of Mechanical Systems IRF’2013 1 PAPER REF: 4035 PREPARATION OF A TEXTILE AND CLOTHING COMPANY TO LEAN IMPLEMENTATION BY IDENTIFYING ERGONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS Laura Costa Maia 1 (*) , Anabela Carvalho Alves 1 , Celina Pinto Leão 2 1 Centre for Industrial and Technology Management, Department of Production and Systems, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal 2 Centro Algoritmi, Department of Production and Systems, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal (*) Email: id2932@alunos.uminho.pt ABSTRACT This paper intends to identify ergonomic and environmental risks, in the different sectors of the Portuguese Textile and Clothing Industry (TCI). This identification will be used in order to have a better understanding of the risks in each sector of TCI. Knowing these risks, some more focused proposals oriented by a Lean methodology, could be recommended to eliminate them more rapidly. The Lean methodology to implement Lean in TCI is already in development and includes ergonomic and sustainable tools to solve the problems related with the identified risks. These tools will allow analysing and evaluating the risks to improve the work environment. Keywords: Ergonomics, Lean Production, Sustainable tools, Textile and Clothing Industry. 1. INTRODUCTION Lean Production (LP) (Womack et al., 1990) is a well-known work organizational model being, nowadays, widely implemented in all sort of industries and services companies. LP responds to customers’ demand for on-time delivery of high quality products at reduced costs, through continuous waste elimination, respecting people and environment. To implement LP in Portuguese Textile and Clothing Industry (TCI), the authors proposed a methodology (Maia et al., 2012a). Briefly, this methodology is divided in three phases: 1) preparation of work environment and people; 2) implementation of methodology and 3) evaluation, standardization and sustainability, considering different dimensions: the ergonomic dimension, the sustainability dimension, the operational dimension and the human capital dimension. TCI can be segmented into different sectors: spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing, finishing, printing, stamping and clothing. The identification of environmental and ergonomic risks will be specified for each sector. Ergonomic risks include lighting, fire risks, posture risks, movements, heavy loads to lift among others. Environmental risks include noise, dust and fibers thermal environment gases and steam radiation, vibrations, biological agents, and also include water, air and soil pollution and raw materials, energy and water consumption in excess, among others. Environment risks are a type of environmental wastes that are also discussed in this paper. The objective of this paper is to identify those risks for each sector of TCI in order to know them and understand better the risks involved and environmental wastes in a context of LP implementation.