People-centred production design

This case reports on a worldwide operating SME producing floor cleaning machines. The SME distinguishes itself from its competitors by providing highly customizable high-quality products. Employees are one of the “most-valuable resources” to the management. However, the initial situation reveals significant improvement opportunities related to the employee involvement and empowerment concerning workplace re-design. The proposed subject-oriented solution aims to involve shop floor workers in workplace (re-)design by providing them structural empowerment means such as social media for suggestion proposals, discussions and negotiations. Furthermore, the newly introduced features are designed to allow for context-sensitive reporting of suggestions and errors. Context-sensitive elicitation provides the basis for analysing impacts of changes (e.g. the affected location or worker) and visualizing potential improvement areas within the shop floor. The generic suggestion and error handling process can be tailored to different organizations. The S-BPM process handling has been integrated with a semantic wiki allowing for context-sensitive workplace improvement elicitation and change propagation analysis. The evaluation reports on findings in developer workshops, focus groups and user tests conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach (formative part), and on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the given SME (summative part).