Alignment of a Collaborative Resistance Model With a Change Management Process in Industry: A Case Study on Production Automation

Current research and literature lack the discussion of how production automation is introduced to existing lines from the perspective of change management. This paper presents a case study conducted to understand the change management process for a large-scale automation implementation in a manufacturing environment producing highly complex products. Through a series of fifteen semi-structured interviews of eight engineers from three functional backgrounds, a process model was created to understand how the company of study introduced a new automation system into their existing production line, while also noting obstacles identified in the process. This process model illustrates the duration, sequencing, teaming, and complexity of the project. This model is compared to other change process models found in literature to understand critical elements found within change management. The process that was revealed in the case study appeared to contain some elements of a design process as compared to traditional change management processes found in literature. Finally, a collaborative resistance model is applied to the process model to identify and estimate the resistance for each task in the process. Based on the objective analysis of the collaborative situations, the areas of highest resistance are identified. By comparing the resistance model to the interview data, the results show that the resistance model does identify the challenges found in interviews. This means that the resistance model has the potential to identify obstacles within the process and open the opportunity to mitigate those challenges before they are encountered within the process.