The development and role of human factors for manufacturing in the European economic community

This article is in four sections. The first section outlines research programs funded by the European Economic Community (EEC) and by a selection of its member states that are relevant to the development of human factors expertise for manufacturing industry. Some of the important EEC projects are listed in an appendix. This section also describes some relevant European Directives (legal documents) and standards activities. The second section addresses trends in manufacturing industry in the EEC and associated human factors aspects, including: cost management and resource allocation; traceability; total quality; production resource management; communications; standardization; shrinkage of the design life cycle; the software-engineered manufacturing organization; “clean” manufacture; and the distributed enterprise. The third section addresses in more detail the need to reduce the design to manufacture life cycle. The “concurrent engineering” philosophy is examined from a human factors perspective, with discussion of the need for restructuring engineering knowledge, and for distributed, cooperative team working. Finally, in the fourth section, a number of issues are outlined that are of current importance to manufacturing industry and must be addressed by human factors professionals. These include: the need to understand human knowledge and expertise; the development of methods to help identify the right structure for organizations; identifying appropriate roles for people before they are determined by technology; training and retraining; the design of support software so that it is usable by end-users; and the design of appropriate interfaces for multiuser systems of the future. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.