Your team screws overhead at a height of 170 cm. Boxes sit on the floor, and every lift weighs 18 kg. Cycle time varies by 6 seconds, and quality suffers. You see the problems and want to solve them systematically.
With a sound strain analysis, you bring ergonomics and workstation design together and create clarity about risks, routes, and cycle time. This relieves the team, stabilizes the process, and protects quality. With 3D planning in VR, postures, grasping areas, and reaches become visible immediately. You compare variants at 1:1 scale and document the decisions. Halocline offers a pragmatic way to do this, with no training required, without CAD data, and with fast loops.
A strain analysis in assembly assesses postures, forces and loads, repetitions, grasping paths, working heights, and cycle times. The benefit comes from the combination: more neutral postures reduce risks, shorter routes reduce variation, and suitable working heights stabilize the cycle and raise quality.
Neck and back flexion, twisting, and overhead work are critical. Even 15 to 20 degrees of trunk flexion over a longer period can contribute to complaints, especially combined with rotation. The goal is a neutral posture in which the head, shoulders, and trunk stay as close to the middle position as possible. Working heights based on elbow height and field of view help with this.
How straining a load is depends on its weight, grip height, and distance from the body. An 18 kg part is much more straining at a grip height of 35 cm and a distance of 60 cm than at a height of 90 cm and a distance of 30 cm. High repetition rates, such as 20 to 30 screwing operations per cycle, increase the risk further. Long grasping paths and regripping cost time and effort; every additional grip change adds seconds and increases variation.
For an ergonomic assembly workstation, you plan grip heights mainly between 80 and 120 cm and keep components close to the body, ideally within 30 cm of reach. You take different body heights into account using anthropometric assumptions, for example for the 5th to 95th percentile. When routes, heights, and loads fit together, variation goes down, cycle time becomes more stable, and fewer errors occur.
Different methods suit different questions:
You also need clean input data: the workflow with time shares and disruptions, the actual cycle time in seconds, product and part data with dimensions in cm and masses in kg, grasp points, and packaging. Add the dimensions of the workstation, the distances to the containers, and the adjustment ranges of tables or lifting aids. Anthropometry represents the workforce; it makes sense to include short, medium-height, and tall people with their reaches and fields of view. Data sources are shopfloor observations, videos, time studies based on MTM or REFA, 3D planning, and bills of materials.
Planning in VR adds speed. Halocline is the planning platform for production layouts and workstations. You build the layout or import existing data, assign weights to the parts, and check reaches for short and tall people. Grasping area avatars show the optimal and maximum grasping area and the working planes for the body height you set, calculated according to DIN 33402-2 and DIN EN ISO 14738. If you run through the workflow in VR and record it, the ergonomics analysis based on the key indicator method assesses every object movement by weight, distance, lifting distance, and duration and marks potentially and critically unergonomic movements in yellow and red. For an EAWS assessment, the layout data can be reused in the ema Work Designer by imk. You document decisions with screenshots and a short justification, without waiting for detailed CAD data.
Overhead screwing: If you lower the screw point from 170 to 135 cm, the arms no longer have to be raised permanently. The REBA score drops from 9 to 5, and cycle time variation halves from 6 to 3 seconds.
Boxes on the floor: If you raise the boxes from 35 to 90 cm and move them 20 cm closer, routes per cycle get around 220 cm shorter, and four regrips disappear.
Grasping zone: If you move the grasping zone from 60 to 160 cm to 80 to 120 cm, the share of grasps outside the range around elbow height drops noticeably, and movements become steadier.
Lifting 18 kg: With grip aids, two-handed lifting, and a shorter distance from the body, the assessment according to the NIOSH lifting equation improves significantly, and the cycle becomes more stable.
The benefit becomes measurable through ergonomics and performance metrics:
Images from VR and a short variant comparison make the decision easy to follow.
Joint reviews speed up validation. Assembly, industrial engineering and lean, occupational safety (EHS), and team leadership look at the same 3D status. One person walks through the workstation in VR, the others follow the walkthrough in spectator mode on screen, and decisions are recorded directly. With free viewer licenses, people without their own planning license can view the model too. The results feed into a prioritized list of measures that separates quick improvements from investment topics and reach the shopfloor through work instructions, training, and visual standards.
Siemens in Karlsruhe shows how much time this saves: there, workstation design with Halocline became 4x faster.
Want to check the strain at your assembly workstation before you rebuild? Get started for free with Halocline Free and build your first workstation in 3D. For process analysis and the ergonomics check, get in touch and we'll show you the right scope.
