Impact of ageing workforces on long-term efficiency of manufacturing systems

Abstract

Many industrial nations are faced with the question of the effects of the demographic development, particularly with respect to the employment of an ageing workforce. An increase in the share of older employees is to be expected, while the share of younger employees and therefore the number of skilled workers decreases. Their employment will not only be mandatory but will also increase in numbers in order to maintain the share of skilled workers, their know-how, and their experience. However, this development is opposed by the deterioration of physical abilities, which needs to be compensated by technical aids and organisational measures. The associated effects on occupation and productivity may be estimated as to quality but cannot be quantified on an operational level to date. However, special approaches for the modelling of personnel-oriented simulations are available in order to answer these questions for individual production systems with respect to the quantitative assessment. Using the simulator ESPE-AS, which is geared towards age-appropriate structuring of processes and tasks, performance developments of a given workshop and workforce can be forecasted for future time spans. This article describes this procedure and shows with the help of a pilot study how the development of the productivity of an ageing workforce can be forecasted for a period of several years.The long-term performance of a non-automated manufacturing system significantly depends on the available workforce. Thereby, the efficiency of manufacturing processes that is demanded in every respect, increasingly leads to teamwork solutions, for example, in manual assembly systems of serial products. The commonly high division of labour in this area requires of an individual employee high repetition rates of his task. However, the assembly task assigned to one employee often only takes a few minutes. Increasingly shorter processing times are required in the face of continuous cost reduction measures. In the case of interlinked work systems, this leads to shorter cycle times. However, the requirement for shorter cycle times favours the qualification profiles of younger employees who can usually better handle this necessity than older ones. Often, it is common practice to assign tasks independent from individuals and without any specific consideration of an employee's age and longterm development potential. The differences in the employees' performance potentials are at best implicitly considered when tasks are being assigned.Against the background of an increasing duration of vocation and occupation and the possibly limited chances for continual professional development, the heterogeneity of work performance will become more and more noticeable over the years. As a result, industrial work systems will have to prepare themselves for a performance differentiated staff and to consider appropriate organisational and creative measures. When interpreting future work systems, it is therefore necessary to consider the development of human performance ove...

Simulation analysis for managing and improving productivity

“…Based on a study conducted by El-Khalil (2009) manufacturing companies such as Toyota and the Big Three have been utilizing discrete computer modeling and simulation for issues such as design, analyzing behavior, predicting performance (at different range of variables), recommending system changes, studying labor, and machine changes on throughput within the manufacturing process. The following are some of the advantages of utilizing discrete-event simulation (Adel et al, 2013;Anand and Kodali, 2009;EL-Khalil, 2013;Liker, 2004;Law, 2007;Zulch and Becker, 2010):…”