Application of participatory design of work and assembly processes in a manufacturing system

许多制造领域都面临着与不稳定的需求和消费者对质量、便利性和价格的高期望相关的挑战。为了应对这些挑战，制造和商业实践正在不断发展，更加强调团队合作，例如并行工程产品团队。然而，要真正有效，需要来自制造环境中成员的多个观点的参与。认识、理解和促进价值观是必不可少的，尽管这在各个研究领域都得到了提倡，但将正式系统设计方法与社会技术系统理论（STS）结合起来并不是一个成熟的研究领域，需要通过有根据和详细的案例研究进一步探索，比如这里为JamiesonTM实验室提出的案例研究。贾米森实验室在生产优质天然维生素和补充剂方面的创新和卓越得到了认可。在Jamieson配送中心，定制的展示是为各种产品设计和手工组装的。自2003年以来，订单平均每年增长25.5%，目前超过10万台。虽然这种增长创造了大量的商业和就业机会，但目前在工艺多功能性方面存在挑战（2012年有396种不同的显示配置和独特的库存单元），达到并保持质量标准，这反过来又产生了重新设计显示组装工作流程的需求。这项研究的预期结果包括改进Jamieson配送中心的装配流程，以及对人与流程设计之间关系的更多见解，这些见解可以转化为适用于其他人机界面环境的理论。

Many manufacturing domains are encountering challenges related to volatile demands and high consumer expectations with respect to quality, convenience, and price. To meet these challenges, manufacturing and business practices are evolving, with more emphasis being placed on teamwork, such as concurrent engineering product teams. However, to be truly effective, participation from multiple points of view from members in the manufacturing environment is required. Recognizing, understanding, and promoting values are essential, and although this has been advocated in various fields of study, combining formal systems design approaches with socio-technical systems theory (STS) is not a mature area of research, and needs to be explored further with grounded and detailed case studies, such as the one proposed here for JamiesonTM Laboratories. Jamieson Laboratories has been recognized for innovation and excellence in producing premium natural-source vitamins and supplements. At the Jamieson Distribution Center, custom displays are designed and manually assembled for a variety of products. Since 2003, orders have grown by an average of 25.5% year-to-year, and presently exceed over 100,000 units. While this growth has created substantial business and employment opportunities, challenges now exist in process versatility (396 different display configurations and unique stock keeping units in 2012), attaining and maintaining quality standards, which in turn has created a need to re-design the display assembly work process. The expected outcomes of this research include an improved assembly process at the Jamieson Distribution Center, and additional insights into relationship between people and process design that can be translated into theory applicable to other human-machine interface environments.