Implantando la Industria 4.0. Diseno participativo desde la vision de los empleados de ingenieria.
| Autor | Pfeiffer, Sabine |
| Cargo | MONOGR |
Doing Industry 4.0--participatory design on the shop floor in the view of engineering employees
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Participatory Design: Urgently Required--but Lacking? An Introduction (4)
The advent of Industry 4.0 has been heralded for some years. The supposed new paradigm includes a whole range of new technologies. These include new approaches in robotics, wearables, machine learning or additive processes, but above all the networking of everything physical in the production process. From the start, observers have challenged technical determinism and asked whether and to what extent the change taking place can be influenced (Kagermann, Wahlster and Helbig, 2013). It is widely believed that this is possible in general terms; old notions of technological determinism have fallen out of fashion. If Industry 4.0 thus affords or even requires some scope for design, the question arises: Who designs, and by which processes? This question is not purely normative, possibly even less so than in the phases of automation and digitization that have taken place in past decades. Instead participatory design is a functional necessity of digitization itself, because Industry 4.0 as and its technical complexities meet existing production facilities. Processes and work organization have to change, decisions about workplace requirements have to be made. To implement all this efficiently and effectively, a top-down approach may not be sufficient. Already in the complex production environments of today, the experiential knowledge of employees on the shop floor is important every time new automation technology is implemented.
Since industry 4.0 is more demanding, more complex and technologically more far-reaching yet than previous automation, we suggest that even more inclusion of the employees' experience knowledge could be necessary: Individual technical facets of digitization are only usable once they have been intentionally designed (for example, AI only works after learning and being "fed" data); new business models only develop when different technologies are connected to one another and to new forms of organization, service provision and consumption. None of this can be bought "ready-made"; in its current phase, digitization very much needs to be worked on at a social and organizational level--before innovations are deployed. The large number of new technical options allows, at least potentially, a qualitatively different form of production, but the steps to that goal seem to be proceeding more disruptively than the technological changes of past decades (Pfeiffer, 2017; Zysman & Kenney, 2017). This too suggests that, at an operational level, the processes and actors involved in designing this future might (perhaps necessarily) not be the same as before.
Outward, the implementation of Industry 4.0 is confronted with new limits on design options: digital infrastructures and smart algorithms, for example, may be partly inaccessible adaptations when they are under proprietary licensing or other intellectual property protection; processes of real technological development and economic formation are separated from their use and effects, and are carried out in other societies, under other labour laws, at other times, and by other actors. Path dependencies and ever-accelerating dynamics hamper and undermine established structures of operational and institutional design, which usually need time to adapt, to handle conflicts, and find consensus. This becomes apparent, for example, when the actors of the world of work complain about ever-lower capacities, about a lack of time and overly rapid technological progress, and about the excessive complexity and lack of transparency of the new technologies.
In short, designing Industry 4.0 may be both harder and more necessary.
Given this challenge, it may be promising to design 4.0 technologies, their forms of use and business models, in a much more participatory way than was customary in the retrospectively numbered industrial revolutions 1.0 to 3.0. Methods allowing the experience of prospective users to be incorporated into the design process earlier and more systematically are currently attracting much attention in the context of agile project management (Patton, 2015) and design thinking (Schmiedgen, 2011). The crowd, and collaborating prosumers, are also increasingly being included in processes of open innovation n (Wittke & Hanekop, 2011), and participation in the genesis of technology is regarded as one of the prominent applications of the "social innovation" concept (Murray, Caulier-Grice and Mulgan, 2010). These more recent approaches build on ideas of participation by future users, ideas which have long existed in other traditions of participation, and which more explicitly consider employees as users. Examples are computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW; Boulos-Rodje, Ellingsen, Bratteteig, Aanestad and Bjorn, 2015), action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2010), or workplace design (Rasmus, 2011).
Thus, there is no shortage of approaches and methods relating to participation. More and more companies are using agile methods, design thinking and open innovation to involve prospective end consumers. So far, however, virtually nothing is known about whether and to what extent employees on the shop floor are being given a greater role in the design of the 4.0 world, and whether this is actually happening in production--that is, on the level of skilled labour, which is central for the core processes of Industry 4.0.
Up to now, design decisions in production about new automation solutions and the related digitization have usually been made by engineering departments often organized according to a strict division of labour (e.g. between mechanical engineering and IT), mainly following academic methods and thus integrating employees on the shop floor only in the last step. These well-established processes of implementing individual automation solutions are reaching their limits in Industry 4.0. However, if industry 4.0 requires more participation, we need to: What do the experts in the engineering think about more participation and related design processes? How do those employed in this area perceive and put into practice the participation of the shop floor today, and how do they expect to engage production workers in the coming implementation of Industry 4.0?
The relevant studies on this topic dealing with manufacturing companies and, specifically, the relationship between skilled workers and engineers, are limited in number, mainly older, and therefore do not take into account Industry 4.0 (Asdonk, Bredeweg and Kowol, 1993; Bieber, 1997; Funken, 1994; Manske, 1995; Wolf, 2012). More recent studies relating to Industry 4.0 have either accompanied pilot implementations (Lingitz & Hold, 2015), or focused on the role of employee representation (Georg, Katenkamp, Guhlemann and Dechmann, 2017). Research has consistently shown that production workers in Germany are especially highly skilled, mainly because of the vocational education and training system (Aizenman, Jinjarak, Ngo and Noy, 2017; Heinz & Jochum, 2014; Nicklich & Fortwengel, 2017; Steedman, Hilary, 2014). Besides formal training, however, there is also valuable, domain-specific experiential knowledge on the shop floor, which proves especially useful in highly technologized environments, as shown by studies on the introduction of CNC technology (Bohle, 1994; Bohle & Milkau, 1988), as well as more recent studies on assembly work and robotics (Pfeiffer, 2016). This "living working capacity" (Arbeitsvermogen) is personal, physical and informal (Pfeiffer, 2014; Pfeiffer & Suphan, 2015), and shows its particular strength when it comes to dealing with complexity and working in digital environments (Bohle & Huchler, 2017). And what works well today could also prove to be a relevant resource for the future. It therefore seems an obvious step to incorporate this special knowledge and ability of employees on the shop floor into the design of future manufacturing.
In summary, participatory design is urgently required, promising methods and processes are available and shop floor employees have a lot to offer. But what is it really like in the companies? Are available resources appreciated and fully utilized in participatory processes? Is the future of manufacturing in Industry 4.0 even seen as deliberatively "designable"? And what views on Industry 4.0 and its participatory design can be found among those who have so far been largely responsible for the design of incremental innovation on the shop floor, that is, the engineers who, in large-scale production plants, make the actual decisions about machines, manufacturing technologies and the degree of automation?
This article presents the results of surveys of these engineers in a German automotive plant. The focus is on their views, experiences and ideas for the future regarding the participation of shop floor workers in the context of Industry 4.0. The data, gathered in 2016, consist of 13 qualitative interviews, group discussions and feedback workshops and from a quantitative online survey (N = 233), including a Q-sort. The method and the factory studied are presented in section 2, the empirical findings are set out in section 3, grouped according to the different survey methods, and are then discussed in section 4.
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Method and factory studied
The automotive factory studied produces mainly smaller commercial vehicles; at the time of the survey it employed around 15,000 people. Structural data for the factory can be found in the employee study carried out by the metalworkers' union, IG Metall, in 2013: (5) more than a fifth of the workforce of this factory (N = 3232) was covered by this survey. According to the study, the vast majority of the respondents from this plant are male (87.6%), with only 12.4% female. (6) The mean age of the employees, according to the IGM study, is 40.97 years (SD...
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