A Competence Based Approach to Support the Working Force Within Assembly Lines
An increasing diversification and customization of products, lead to a broad product mix within assembly lines. These mixed-model assembly lines challenge the production planning, because of a varying capacity utilization depending on the specific mixture
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Abstract An increasing diversification and customization of products, lead to a broad product mix within assembly lines. These mixed-model assembly lines challenge the production planning, because of a varying capacity utilization depending on the specific mixture of variants. To prevent quality defects and productivity losses, companies implement different strategies to support their workforce—such as the integration of auxiliary workers. The paper presents an approach, which increases the coordination efficiency of auxiliary workers by using competence profiles. The changing production environment also raises the cognitive load of workers. Therefore companies need to think of new strategies to support them while learning new operations or product variants. The described approach also introduces a concept that allows qualifying people on the job by using a specific type of auxiliary worker. The question whether this concept has a positive impact on learning curves, has been examined in an empirical research study. Keywords Assembly system
Competency Qualification
1 Introduction and Need for Action Global competition as well as the growing importance of customer demands lead to a higher diversification of products [1]. To assemble these products, the assembly lines need to be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to handle an extensive product mix [2]. Especially balanced mixed-model assembly lines raise problems for the production planning. These lines are characterized by a one-piece-flow of different variants running through the same assembly process [3]. Due to the variants the number of assembly operations as well as the needed time at one assembly station C. Dollinger (&) G. Reinhart Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management (iwb), Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstraße 15, 85748 Garching, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 C. Schlick and S. Trzcieliński (eds.), Advances in Ergonomics of Manufacturing: Managing the Enterprise of the Future, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 490, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41697-7_48
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can vary. Depending on the available capacity, the worker will exceed the cycle time of the process at worst. This has a negative impact on the productivity of the entire assembly system. To counteract this problem, some companies use auxiliary workers, so-called jumpers [4] or floaters [5]. These kind of workers are not directly integrated in the assembly process, they just step in on demand, for example when a capacity peak is reached at a workstation or when a worker needs a short pause. Two types of jumpers can be distinguished. In the following, a jumper that assists another worker is designated as “assistance jumper” and a jumper that replaces someone is hereafter defined as “replacement jumper”. Because of higher labor costs for jumpers and a higher fluctuation in their assignments, existing approaches try to minimize their number and to maximize their utiliza
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