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

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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.