Human contribution to collaborative supply chain planning and scheduling: a case study in automotive industry

The hierarchical production planning and control has been disputed since the early 1990s and a paradigm shift has emerged that highlights the role of humans in controlling job shops. However, most approaches to supply chain management still follow the conventional hierarchical approach, which establishes the interaction between supply partners at the management control level and does not consider decisional role for shopfloor control level. This study challenges this viewpoint. It discusses human contribution to collaborative supply-chain planning and scheduling within automotive industry. The development and execution of plans in a car manufacturing group and its suppliers are discussed. The research methodology involves an analysis of qualitative data from an ethnographic field study on planning and scheduling practices. Two scenarios of collaborative scheduling are analysed through which it is shown how the operational levels adapt their own strategies to cope with operational variations. The management control systems do not receive detailed information of what happens. They receive aggregate reports of non-conformances during the execution for which they develop compensatory plans and send them to the task control level and the story repeats from the beginning

A foundation for analysis of human cooperation in multi-party scheduling

Activities involving multiple participants need to be coordinated. It requires parties schedule joint activities together. Multi-party scheduling consists of the development of schedules across organisational groups. Where uncertainty and ill-defined information are involved, human cooperation is vital in making decisions. Schedulers view a range of tasks and plans as common. However, their domain knowledge differs and they have individual goals and tasks. Hence, cooperative and individual activities must be harmonised, in a holistic framework of true collaborative state. This paper analyses the schedulers’ cooperative activities when coordinating joint tasks. It sets a foundation for studying their behaviour cooperating. A model of Cognitive Work Analysis for decision-making with multiple goals is applied and extended to include interactions between collaborators. The interactions are cooperative activities, where cooperation is viewed as a process of interference management

Collective work in dynamic inter-organizational scheduling

Inter-organizational scheduling is a process, where two or more organizations coordinate activities for mutual benefits. Decision making in such an environment is a multi-criteria, multi-party practice, including cooperation between parties. It is characterized by distributed, dynamic, ill-defined and conflicting information. As this information is in the form of tacit knowledge, its efficient transference between organizations is not possible through databases and computer-supported tools. Therefore human collective work remains a key factor in interorganizational scheduling. This, comprising interaction between human operators, algorithms, software, and autonomous agents implies a need for structural and functional concepts. In this paper, inter-organizational dynamic collective work is studied using a cognitive-based analysis. Our aim is to identify the key factors affecting the process. Through a comparative review of the literature, it is argued that cooperative processes, involving coordination mechanisms, are one component of collaborative states in collective works in scheduling between organizations. In such a way, in collaborative scheduling, group and domain knowledge and tasks, group knowledge, group decision processes, and cooperative activities play a key role. This approach can contribute in system analysis, (re) design, and evaluation as well as designing computer supports in inter-organizational scheduling

Proceedings of the Fifth Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference 2004 COLLECTIVE WORK IN DYNAMIC INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEDULING

Inter-organizational scheduling is a process, where two or more organizations coordinate activities for mutual benefits. Decision making in such an environment is a multi-criteria, multi-party practice, including cooperation between parties. It is characterized by distributed, dynamic, ill-defined and conflicting information. As this information is in the form of tacit knowledge, its efficient transference between organizations is not possible through databases and computer-supported tools. Therefore human collective work remains a key factor in interorganizational scheduling. This, comprising interaction between human operators, algorithms, software, and autonomous agents implies a need for structural and functional concepts. In this paper, inter-organizational dynamic collective work is studied using a cognitive-based analysis. Our aim is to identify the key factors affecting the process. Through a comparative review of the literature, it is argued that cooperative processes, involving coordination mechanisms, are one component of collaborative states in collective works in scheduling between organizations. In such a way, in collaborative scheduling, group and domain knowledge and tasks, group knowledge, group decision processes, and cooperative activities play a key role. This approach can contribute in system analysis, (re) design, and evaluation as well as designing computer supports in inter-organizational scheduling