Standards, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 2024) – 3 articles

Risk management involves thinking about what could happen if someone is exposed to a hazard and the likelihood of this event. The vast majority of standards relating to risk management were written in the context of Occupational Health and Safety, as well as Work Health and Safety with the aim of eliminating all risks. In 2023 Standards, Australia published AS ISO 4980:2023: `Benefit-risk assessment for sport and recreational facilities, activities and equipment’. This standard provides a tool for applying risk management in the context of sport and recreation. AS ISO 4980:2023 is a departure from the traditional view of risk management standards in that it presents a view of risk that is not limited to viewing risk only as negative, but rather balances positive benefits with negative risks within the sport and recreation industry. This standard is also different in that it is based specifically on risk to sport and recreational users and not to employees and employers. The benefit that risk provides in the context of sports and recreational activities is placed on an equal footing with the traditional method of assessing risk. There is an expectation in sports and recreational activities that the user is making an implicit trade-off between the benefits and the inherent risks of the activity, including the potential for harm. This implied expectation is that exposure to risk can be positive. Positive risk and learning from making mistakes are not restricted to childhood development where graduated challenges are used but extend throughout our entire life. The goal of this paper is to draw public attention to the new and different perspective of risk on which AS ISO 4980:2023 is based and to provide an understanding of the concept of benefit–risk assessment. The implications of viewing non-workplace risk in a balanced way are discussed. Full article

The intricate process of planning production, involving product life cycle management and the synthesis of manufacturing information, is crucial for coherence in manufacturing. Manufacturing companies, operating in a high-mix, low-volume production environment, integrate production planning with management to focus on production processes, emphasizing high-quality, rapid product delivery. This includes material item planning to anticipate future demands and ensure sufficient raw material and finished product quantities, considering purchasing, production, and sales capacities. This study explores the electro technical sector, specifically a manufacturing entity specializing in low-voltage plastic cable distribution boxes. It scrutinizes the vital role of seasonal data cleaning in optimizing production planning, with a targeted focus on three products. The implementation of a chase demand strategy is related to capacity planning, taking into account the change in production capacity linked to demand over time. The problem in implementing this strategy is related to the fluctuating level of quality due to changes in demand for specified products. Full article

Decision-making, bringing in the opinions of several stakeholders, may be a rather time- and resource-demanding process. Partial order-based methods like generalized linear aggregation (GLA) and average ranking appear as advantageous tools for considering several stakeholders’ opinions simultaneously. The present study presents an approach where stakeholders’ opinions/weights are substituted by a series of randomly generated weight regimes, leading to virtually identical rankings as demonstrated through comparisons to examples where true stakeholder opinions are applied, as demonstrated through a study on food sustainability. This study showed a high degree of agreement between the ranking based on random data and that based on real stakeholder data. The method, which is a top-down approach to the decision process, appears to be a highly resource-reducing decision-supporting process. However, the method, by default, excludes the possibility of incorporating specific knowledge from, e.g., employees or other stakeholders in the decision process. Full article