Human‐computer interaction and lean production: The shop floor example

The approach in industrial engineering to computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) proved not to be the concept needed for the majority of German companies. At the moment, lean production is the focal point of discussion about production engineering. It tries to combine concepts such as human‐centered organization, internationalization of business, decentralization of decisions, increased development times, total quality management, and process‐oriented business management. There are a variety of implementation areas for lean production. One implementation has been the shop floor‐oriented production support concept as developed by the Fraunhofer Institute IAO in Stuttgart. It focuses on functions such as Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machine tool programming, shop floor control, quality assurance, and resource management, and it aims at decentralized work organization, comprehensive work contents, and support for highly skilled workers on the shop floor. This support is provided by Information Technology (IT) systems that follow the ideas of work enrichment and work enlargement, and use a so‐called shop floor metaphor and graphical user interfaces with standard tool kits. In this way, the shop floor‐oriented production support concept represents a future concept that takes into consideration particularly human factors and human‐computer interaction.