The Task
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face the challenge of organizing production flexibly while at the same time taking into account the social concerns of their workforce. On top of this, demographic change requires employees to be highly adaptable and agile in order to familiarize themselves with new tasks and develop further.
Matrix production is considered a promising solution for these goals: it combines the flexibility advantages of workshop production with the productivity advantages of flow production. Matrix production consists of different production cells that are arranged in a grid-like pattern.
The Goals
- The research project InTeLeMat (“Informal, technology-supported learning systems in matrix production”) is developing process innovations that enable the hybrid role of work for people in the context of matrix production – along the lines of the MTO concept of people, technology and organization.
- The aim is to develop a solution kit for the design of human-centered matrix production that is conducive to learning.
Contribution from FORCAM-ENISCO
- The classic approach to mastering work variants is to provide employees with sufficient training in advance. However, this increases the complexity of workforce scheduling.
- This is because employees must be trained on an ongoing basis and planning must be adapted to the current level of knowledge. At the same time, it must be ensured during the execution of production orders that a loss of knowledge does not lead to quality problems.
- The requirements for this are to be defined in this research project and implemented in personnel deployment planning geared towards matrix production.
Partner-specific goals
- The aim is the prototypical implementation of a quantitative personnel deployment plan that can be used to cover personnel requirements with the available employees depending on the workload.
- Ideally, requirements should be determined at an early stage and the deployment plan (operational and technical measures) should be drawn up over a longer period of time. This is the only way to react flexibly to fluctuations and compensate for bottlenecks at short notice.
- The expected result is a prototype for testing the described use case.
Partners
Fraunhofer IWU Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology; ATB gGmbH; Sarissa GmbH; CPT Präzisionstechnik GmbH; MOGATEC Moderne Gartentechnik GmbH