Lot-Size One Production

This case reports on an SME offering the production of atypical, unique and special-purpose machinery, equipment and technological complex units useful particularly in the automotive and electronic industries. The initial situation reveals challenges like the estimation of production times for one-time prototypes, lack of communication between shop floor workers and technologists, lack of information on upcoming production tasks for workplaces, low involvement of workers in decision processes, and lack of information on current state of production. The proposed subject-oriented solution targets to increase the worker autonomy, the worker involvement and information transparency as well as integration across all organizational control layers. In this respect, subject-orientation is applied to integrate real-time information from the shop floor (e.g. location information of parts, power consumption of machines) and business processes (e.g. customer order). A novel S-BPM modelling approach has been developed in the course of organizational design that seeks to model subjects as fine-grained behaviours of actors rather than functional roles. The revealed behaviours may be assigned to actors (i.e. humans, machines) depending on their capabilities and skills. This allows for dynamic allocation of tasks to humans and machines, process execution support based on skill levels, reflecting performed behaviours of actors and (de-)constructing organizational behaviours. The evaluation is composed of formative and summative elements. The formative evaluation reports on findings based on developer workshops, focus groups and user tests that were conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach. The summative evaluation reports on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the SME.