An attempt and issues to measure workers' aptitude toward assembly tasks in production cells

Abstract

Major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors (machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc.), it is still insufficient to investigate how workers' aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. In this paper, we make an experimental study on the impact of workers' aptitude in cell production system. 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 self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers' aptitude. It was clarified that only two of 11 self-evaluation items have significant relations to productivity of the production cells, and there are some issues to be dealt to measure the workers' aptitude objectively.