Analysis of work-system design stage of production system life cycle using integrated ISM-MIMBI analysis

Abstract

The work-system design stage of production system life cycle (PSLC) mainly provides structure to the productivity of an organisation. It fundamentally involves the job design, worker compensation and work study. The design of work-system is not an easy task for the managers as it is affected by a number of factors hereby known as quality enabled factors (QEFs). QEFs are those factors whose consideration will lead to the better design of work-system. The ultimate need is to analyse the behaviour of these QEFs for their effective utilisation in the work-system design. The main objective of this paper is to recognise the mutual interaction of these QEFs and recognise the 'influencing QEFs' (i.e., which influence the other QEFs) and the 'influenced QEFs' (i.e., which are influenced by other QEFs). In the current work, these QEFs have been recognised through the literature analysis and expert opinions and interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach has been utilised in analysing their mutual interaction. Afterwards, MIMBI (where MI = measure of influencing; MBI = measure of being influenced) analysis has been applied to identify the key QEFs. At last, an integrated model based on ISM and MIMBI analysis has been developed for the effective utilisation of QEFs in the work-system design.