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5.2.

Collaborative Work

Agility emphasizes a collaborative design process whereby engineering disciplines affected
by design decisions are integral participants in making those decisions (Forsythe
et al., 1995). Collaboration permeates all aspects of an agile product realization process,
with specific steps necessary to assure concurrence is obtained early in design, before
precious time and resource commitments have been made. Such extensive collaboration requires an awareness and appreciation of the interests and contributions of each discipline.
However, this is often difficult to attain due to “engineering arrogance” or the belief
that “what I do is difficult and what you do is easy,” and organizational dynamics that
often allot considerable power, influence, and respect to designers, and substantially less
to supporting disciplines.

Many technical innovations may be applied to support collaborative work. For example,
X applications sharing software allows designers, working at their desktops, with
only a moment’s notice, to open a shared CAD representation of a design that they and
other team members may view, and freely manipulate from within the CAD application.
In this way, X applications software enables collaborative design and decisions, making
codesigners of team members who otherwise would have only been reviewers. In addition,
solid models and animated illustrations of machining and robot assembly processes
allow Manufacturing and Assembly engineers to more readily and clearly communicate
their concerns to designers

5.3.

Enterprise Integration of Information Technologies

Agility requires the removal of information bottlenecks and improvement in the continuity
of information flow through the enterprise. It is unacceptable to have work delayed
because information available at one point in the process has not or cannot be transferred
and used at another. In striving for this objective, there is the need to open channels for
information flow and to remove resistance (e.g., cross-platform, cross-application incompatibility)
to information flow

Information may be transmitted via multiple channels depending on urgency, content,
and distribution (e.g., phone, voice-mail, fax, e-mail, ftp, PDM, http). Product Data Management
(PDM) is of particular significance in that it provides team members a central
information repository that offers automatic notification of file and design changes. Thus,
notification and updating of team members does not require a conscious effort, but is
integrated into the day-to-day interactions with the PDM

Agility is enhanced by a seamless flow of information between software applications,
and between software and production hardware. Burdensome file conversions create intolerable
delays for the production process and waste valuable human resources. Agility
requires that the cognitive resources of project personnel be directed toward the challenges
of design, analysis, and decision, and not spent on mundane activities such as data
entry or recoding. Through development of software routines that translate between software
applications and some standardization to compatible software applications, a production
process may be developed that is seamless, from beginning to end

6

CONCLUSION

Agile manufacturing will proceed, with or without the contributions of human factors.
For the field of human factors, agile manufacturing is, more than anything else, an opportunity.
By raising human factors issues, and applying the knowledge and skills gained
from other domains, there is an opportunity for human factors to assume an important
role, positively influencing the future of agile manufacturing. As of 1997, agile manufacturing
is still immature and not yet fully defined. Agile manufacturing poses many
questions best answered by human factors. Our willingness, as a profession, to address these questions will determine whether our role is in the definition of a paradigm or in the
limited role of after-the-fact, fixing what is broken