Software-Tool To Determine Functional Flexibility Based On Employee Specific Risks

Abstract

During training of manual assembly operations, all employees experience continuous improvement caused by learning. This improvement is known as learning behaviour and describes individual improvement of competence and skill. In an assembly system, employees are required to learn various tasks to ensure overall productivity. Job rotation supports the constant change of tasks to enable an environment where employees maintain their skills by changing tasks in defined time-frames. Functional flexibility describes how many employee-workstation-combinations are possible and needs to be determined based on internal and external factors. Especially employee specific risks are predominant in terms of affecting the outcome and can be encountered by considering these risks when determining the level of functional flexibility. This paper provides an approach to assess employee specific risks with the goal to deduct an expected impact. An overall approach describes the process in order to implement a software-tool to determine the level of functional flexibility. The result is considered a tool to support the decision-making process of leaders and executives in production systems regarding determining a necessary competence matrix.