An attempt and issues to measure workers´ aptitude toward assembly tasks in production cells

Major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors (machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc.), it is still insufficient to investigate how workers´ aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. In this paper, we make an experimental study on the impact of workers´ aptitude in cell production system. Our study is different from researches reported so far in that we carry out a laboratory experiment of cell production to measure the productivity of the workers in production cells. Meanwhile we designed a self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers´ aptitude. It was clarified that only two of 11 self-evaluation items have significant relations to productivity of the production cells, and there are some issues to be dealt to measure the workers´ aptitude objectively.