Activity-based shop floor management – A concept to enhance flexibility

Abstract

Volatile markets, an increasing shortage of skilled workers and individual customer requirements as well as the growing desire for a fulfilling work-life balance among employees are influencing the production environment. Flexibility and adaptability are possible key factors to enable companies to meet these challenges. A concept for an activity-based shop floor management has been developed to make work organization more flexible in the area of production. In this concept, first of all activity packages are defined and evaluated, for example with regard to their requirements. Furthermore, it is necessary to define competence levels into which the employees are clustered according to their abilities. Thus, a competence-oriented matching of activity packages and employees is possible. The employee can choose tasks from the pre-grouped activity packages. The result is a generally valid concept for flexible staff deployment planning, which is evaluated in the automotive industry. This concept allows a change from role-based to activity-based task assignment with gamified incentive system, whereby specialists can be deployed more efficiently according to their qualifications.