Identifying Factors Reflecting Workers’ Aptitude toward Assembly Tasks in Production Cells

Abstract

Although major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors such as machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc., it has been found that for successful implementation of cell production systems, some human issues should be treated seriously. One of these issues is that productivity of production cells depend largely on workers and therefore it is important to consider how to measure workers' aptitude and investigate how workers' aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. In this paper, we make an experimental study to identify factors influencing workers' aptitude toward assembly tasks and productivity in production cells. Our study is different from researches reported so far in that we carry out a laboratory experiment of cell production to measure the productivity of the workers in production cells. Meanwhile we designed a selfevaluation sheet to measure the workers' aptitude from three viewpoints: growth-need strength, self-efficacy and core self-evaluation. It was clarified that only one factor: growth-need strength has significant relations to productivity of the production cells, and there are some issues to be dealt further.  Index Terms-cell production, cellular manufacturing, growth-need strength, self-efficacy, workers' aptitude I. INTRODUCTION Cellular manufacturing, often called cell production in Japan, arranges factory floor labor into semi-autonomous and multi-skilled teams, or work cells, who manufacture complete products or complex components. Properly trained and implemented cells are more flexible and responsive than the traditional mass-production line. Cell production has become an integral part of lean manufacturing systems; many organizations have applied cell production concepts in manufacturing and service processes. The effects of cell production are including reduction in setup time, cycle time, tooling requirements and material handling. Furthermore, implementation of cell production has been shown to achieve significant improvements in product quality, scheduling, space utilization, control of operations and employee morale [1]. Over the past 30 years, many manufacturing companies are adopting a cellular manufacturing approach in an attempt to improve their competitiveness. Meanwhile, many researchers have paid a lot of attention to cell production system design problems, such as the