Adopting industry 4.0 and lean practices in heavy metalworking: Impact of human factors on productivity

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing culture is enshrined as an industrial management policy. Moreover, production planning and manufacturing operations management tools, such as Work Sampling (WS), has long been successfully used. WS is known for its ability to support decision-making, especially regarding production capacity and delivery times. This paper presents the results of a pilot study developed in a heavy metalworking Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME), located in the North of Portugal, that manufactures metal structures, and where WS has been implemented to assess human factors that impact productivity, such as physical disposition, fatigue, and stress, which have been estimated, based on biological markers acquired from workers while performing its working activities in the shop floor. This work proposes introducing the SME to Lean practices within the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm, as it is intended to move the WS tool from the traditional application for forecasting to a predictive and real-time tool that can be of great value for the Operation Manager, augmenting its capabilities to effectively manage relevant human factors that impact productivity, based on a dashboard fed with real-time data acquired from workers working at the shop floor. The paper shows that these factors have an impact on production performance, according to the initial hypothesis. The purpose of the presented research, based on the analyzed results, is (1) to develop an application model of Lean tools that privileges the predictive orientation in place of the preventive one, in a perspective that is assumed to be aligned with the pattern of Industry 4.0; and (2), to propose a way to introduce SMEs to the development circuit for Industry 4.0 with the first steps based on the consecrated good practices of industrial management remodeled to the pattern of Industry 4.0.