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Support of opportunities for shopfloor involvement through information and communication technologies

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Abstract

More companies are understanding the benefits of designing work to enhance, rather than minimise, the contributions of their employees within human-centred systems. To do this, they require their supportive subsystems (such as training, job, and team design, performance measurement and information) to provide people with the ability, motivation and opportunity to become increasingly involved. Opportunity for involvement will require different communication interfaces, providing data and background information both personally and at the work site or process. In the past few years, the media available for visualisation and communication have become much more numerous and have much greater capabilities. This paper examines the information requirements of certain features of modern manufacturing enterprises—local control, skills, knowledge and training, function allocation and team communications. It then assesses the utility of three broad types of information display—Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Multimedia/Closed-circuit Television (CCTV) and Virtual Environments (VEs)—for shopfloor systems.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to all my colleagues in the IOE, VIRART and the MRL, with whom I have worked on the issues covered in this paper over the years. Some of the work was completed under various grants from DTI, ESRC and EPSRC, and latterly under grant IST-2000-26089 from the European Commission. The comments of anonymous reviewers have strengthened the paper enormously and I am grateful for their thoughtful contributions.

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  1. Institute for Occupational Ergonomics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    John R. Wilson

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Wilson, J.R. Support of opportunities for shopfloor involvement through information and communication technologies. AI & Soc 17, 114–133 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-003-0250-5

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