Parameters affecting quality in manual assembly of engines

Abstract

In manufacturing, it is vital that operators and other production personnel have the right information at the right time and right place. But what happens if we overestimate the usability of information for supporting the personnel in their assembly tasks?When does information serve as a quality assurance tool, and when does it become a too large part of the workload, thus reducing the time for core workplace activities, and instead becoming a part of the personnel’s workload? This paper reports on work that has been conducted at a heavy diesel engine assembly plant with the aim of finding information usability parameters that can affect the personnel negatively or positively.\nThe paper presents and describes an evaluation of an existing information system at the plant. The aim of the evaluation was to find out why the assembly personnel, despite the fact that they had “all the information they needed”, did not always assemble the product according to specification and thereby caused an engine reject that had to be re-assembled.\nThe initial hypothesis was that there would be a strong correlation between the production volume and the number of rejects due to “Information Overload”. However, the study revealed that the personnel do not use the IT system in a way that causes information overload. Instead, the degree to which the IT system supports/triggers different forms of information seeking behaviour is thought to be one of the main factors influencing internal reject.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.