Information for operational tasks: five cases in Swedish production

Better resource utilisation for production systems can be achieved in many different ways. When it comes to human workers, they can either be allocated as more flexible machines, loaded with materials and a set of instructions, or they can be trusted to plan their own work. Moving towards the more automated and highly connected future production system suggests that human operators should be more empowered. This requires that they can be provided with the tools and environment that allow for this. Human workers need information but it is not clear how that information should be made available. This study presents five cases from four Swedish companies in the manufacturing industry. The tasks and decisions the operators do are presented in relation to the information that is available, the experience level needed and the communication of the eventual outcome.