Designers
Steuerung Arbeitssicherheit und Ergonomie: Arman Dehghani, Martin Erl, Fabian Günzkofer, Stefan Kaltenbrunner, Eva Lanzendörfer, Andreas Röbig, Kristina Schreyer, Marc Snell
Year
2021
Category
Product
Country
Germany
Three questions to the project team
What was the particular challenge in the project from a UX point of view?
The BMW Group places a high value on the maintenance and promotion of employee health and productivity. SERA unifies all ergonomic- and safety-relevant aspects of a workplace to enable comprehensive risk management. Ensuring intuitive system usability for a wide range of functions and for all the diverse user groups at BMW was a particular challenge during the development of SERA. In addition to the question of usability, the fulfillment of all relevant international laws and standards further added to the complexity. Transparency for all our 120,000 worldwide employees is achieved by using innovative graphics and interfaces to convey the complex subject matters. This transparency is key for making well-informed decisions regarding the wellbeing of our employees and organization. With the development of SERA, the BMW Group has created an exceptional tool to promote the design of healthy workplaces, with the goal of strengthening the long-term health and productivity of our employees.
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha! moment, was there a low point?
It was truly a monumental challenge to unify the legal and individual user requirements across all our 30 production and assembly facilities, which are distributed across 14 countries. This was especially true when country-specific laws also had to be considered. A highly interdisciplinary team effort was required to realize all these complex requirements. The journey from idea to product required substantial time and energy and resulted in many Lessons-Learned. Even when certain situations seemed insurmountable, the team was able to refocus on our guiding principle and find a common solution. The primary objective always remained: to sustainably strengthen the long-term health and productivity of our production employees.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Currently we are focused on enabling a completely digital assessment of ergonomic stresses using a combination of motion tracking and force measuring glove. Within the next five years we hope to use these advanced digital measurement techniques in SERA to proactively identify both risks and the corresponding countermeasures. With the expansion of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, even sensors in the workplace environment could aid in the identification of such risks. The SERA system is a crucial component for the protection of employees at the BMW Group and can therefore itself be considered an ideal preventative measure for the maintenance of health.
