HUMAN, TECHNOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL ASPECTS INFLUENCING THE PRODUCTION SCHEDULING PROCESS

BY B.ANISH(10MD01)

ABSTRACT
This study of scheduling work in practice addresses how the production-scheduling processes in four companies are inuenced by human, technological, and organizational aspects.

A conclusion is that the outcome of the scheduling process is inuenced by the scheduler adding human capabilities that cannot be automated, by technical constraints in the scheduled production system and by the available scheduling software tools.

Furthermore, the outcome is inuences not only by how the scheduling process is formally organized, but also by the schedulers informal authority and the role taken to interconnect activities between different organizational groups.

INTRODUCTION
Production scheduling is an activity concerning fullling deliveries in which many demands and restrictions must be handled and negotiated. MacCarthy et al. (2001) identied the skill and performance of production schedulers as making a signicant contribution to the achievement of high productivity and exibility. The results presented in this paper are part of a study of production planning and scheduling practice undertaken in four Swedish woodworking companies: a sawmill, a parquet manufacturer, a furniture manufacturer, and a house manufacturer. The paper rst provides a description of the humans, technology and organization (HTO-) concept, which serves both as a meta-concept and a model for analysis that takes into account humans, technology and organization to analyses and improve work systems (Westlander, 1999a)

HUMANS, TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION The HTO-concept nuclear power industry. was developed during the 1980s within the

The aim was to improve overall safety. When developing safety, strong focus was rst put on technical improvements Human error Organizational issues

This led to the realization that all three HTO components in the system need to be addressed to improve safety (Eklund, 2003). The system view of the HTO-concept was considered successful for improving safety and developing a more thorough safety culture and has thereafter spread to other domains. The HTO-concept distinguishes between the individuals and the organization. Therefore, it is suitable for the study of individual schedulers work.

In the HTO-perspective, The H stands for the importance of aspects that are strictly individual and at the same time considered important to perform a task or a change. For example, include individual skill, knowledge, experiences or established relations with other people. The H-component focuses on the individuals contribution to the business process. It may be described at any of the following four levels (Daniellou, 2001). (1) The biological level, regarding the human as a physiological system, (2) The cognitive level, where the human is considered as an informationprocessing system, including thought processes, representations, and decision-making, (3) The psychological level, where the human has a unique history, leading to a specic subjective processing of the situations he/she experiences, (4) The social level, emphasizing that every single individual is a member of several social groups with different cultures, which will partly determine his/her values and habits.

The T in HTO, stands for the technical system. This can be divided into two parts.

Primary technical system

This system that includes the production equipment that is devoted to maintaining the capability of the company. This technical system can be described in different ways in relation to technical limitations, problem, availability and reliability.

Secondary technical system

A secondary technical system is a system that assists the administration and procedures of the company but is not directly associated with the value-adding activities of the business (Waer, 2001). In this study, the secondary technical system consists of the information system, hardware and software that schedulers use as decision support tools.

The third component, the O in HTO represents the H-component in an aggregated sense. The O-component comprises how the work is organized and structured, both formally and informally . Examples of the formal organization are job denitions , responsibilities and powers, hierarchical positions, policies , business goals and strategies.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
The methodological approach chosen for the overall project was Ergonomic work analysis. It is based on the analysis of work activities carried out in real work situations. It sets out to learn about the employees knowledge and competence, how information is collected and treated and how decisions are made. The method rst establishes a detailed description of the mission, that is why the enterprise agreed to participate in the research project, the scheduling task, and the work context comprising technology, work process, roles and activities. Data collection was carried out in three stages,  by acquiring knowledge of scheduling initially by the management,  researchers interviews with the staff, and  through observation of the scheduling activities.

as

described

INTERVIEWS
The interviews covered the production scheduling process, the interviewees involvement and the interactions that took place between different people in different roles.

Company descriptions

FINDINGS Human aspects Technological aspects Organizational aspects

SCHEDULING IN AN HTO-PERSPECTIVE Human aspects inuencing the scheduling process The organization nally inuences the scheduling process such as The importance of the schedulers personal experience of the production systems, The need for the scheduler to understand marketing, sales and company strategies as well as production and in daily work handle incompatible goals, The role of the scheduler as high-value information node, The need for the scheduler to have good social skills, and The role of the scheduler as a problem-solver.

Technological inuencing the scheduling process Technology impacts the scheduling process as it sets prerequisites in two key areas: The production system characteristics and its limitations at a detailed level in terms of capabilities, design failures and reliability, and The scheduling software system and its ability to provide sufficient data, control and decision support as well as to support other aspects of the scheduling task that in this study were largely ignored.

Organizational aspects inuencing the scheduling process The organization nally inuences the through both formal and informal dimensions: scheduling process

The formal organization of the scheduling process, including formal meeting structures, The schedulers informal authority, The schedulers role to interconnect activities between different organizational groups, and The degree of proximity between employees.

CONCLUSION

Comparing the H-, T- and O-components suggests that these are strongly interlinked aspects of scheduling. All three components introduce conditions and limitations for the scheduling process, which strongly suggests that all three components need to be addressed when aiming at improving scheduling processes. We suggest that by taking the HTO components into account from the beginning of any study it is possible to better establish and visualize a broad range of issues that contribute to the outcome of the scheduling process.

REFERENCES

Berglund, M., Karltun, J., 2000. Production planning and scheduling for whom? An analysis of two woodworking industries, CMTO research report 2000:07, Linkopings Universitet, Linkoping. Berglund, M., Karltun, J., 2001. Schedulers realityExpectations and dependencies. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Production Research. Czech Technical University, Prague. Checkland, P., 1981. Systems Thinking and Systems Practice . Wiley, Chicester. Crawford, S., MacCarthy, B.L., Wilson, J.R., Vernon, C., 1999. Investigating the work of industrial schedulers through eld study. Cognition, Technology and Work 1, 6377.