Flow oriented approach for human-centered agile manufacturing systems

The recent individualization in customer demand and fluctuation in business environment require manufacturing systems to follow the changing small trends promptly. This paper proposes Flow Oriented Approach, a method to design manufacturing system information, to accelerate diversified autonomous improvement activities performed by personnel from many departments. Based on this approach, raw data generated and used in manufacturing system are categorized according to work objectives, combined to messages, and made to flow through the system on autonomous decentralized system architecture. A tool on this architecture is also proposed for personnel to use manufacturing information selectively and promptly. This approach makes it possible to process data variously and extract useful information for improvement activities without disturbing on-line operation, in comparison with information sharing by shared files. The proposed approach has been applied to actual manufacturing systems and evaluated in several improvement activities.