Concept for an Employee-Specific Resource Planning in Manual Assembly

An aging workforce, the increasing shortage of skilled labor and volatile markets lead to more challenges in efficient staff scheduling. These challenges affect manufacturing companies in particular. In manufacturing, the growing demands of quality, cost and time as well as the increasing number of sick days related to mental health problems have to be faced. Therefore, a concept for an employee-specific resource planning in manual assembly has been developed. The goal of the concept is to retain the employees’ long-term working performances by rotating to different workstations at individual rotation cycles. The time periods consider each worker’s individual characteristics, such as competences and psychical strain as well as the characteristics of the workplaces, to avoid overloading as well as monotony. The developed concept is divided into three steps and embedded in a socio-technical system. This describes the working area in manual assembly and its components, which include the employees, the workstations, the processes and their respective characteristics. The second step consists of a requirements analysis, which examines the psychological stress on the workplaces. For this purpose, the similarity of required competences and exposed mental stress between workplaces is analyzed. In the third step, the employees are assigned to performance groups, referring to their individual competences and their ability to deal with psychic strain. Based on the characteristics of the workstation and the performance groups, employee-specific rotation times preventing negative effect on long-term performance are predicted. In the final step, the resource planning is automated in an algorithm based on quantifiable characteristics of the individual employees. The output variable, i.e. the rotation plan, is optimized by integrating employee-specific data in a control loop. The control loop builds upon feedback from workers via a smart device. This allows reacting to short-term fluctuations and long-term changes in individual performance conditions. The result is an automated rotation planning system that is constantly optimized through the integration of the prevailing workloads and strains of the employees. Using the system reduces the absence rate of employees due to overload in manufacturing companies.