A competence based approach to support the working force within assembly lines

An increasing diversification and customization of products, lead to a broad product mix within assembly lines. These mixed-model assembly lines challenge the production planning, because of a varying capacity utilization depending on the specific mixture of variants. To prevent quality defects and productivity losses, companies implement different strategies to support their workforce—such as the integration of auxiliary workers. The paper presents an approach, which increases the coordination efficiency of auxiliary workers by using competence profiles. The changing production environment also raises the cognitive load of workers. Therefore companies need to think of new strategies to support them while learning new operations or product variants. The described approach also introduces a concept that allows qualifying people on the job by using a specific type of auxiliary worker. The question whether this concept has a positive impact on learning curves, has been examined in an empirical research study.