Informatics for Socially

Sustainable Manufacturing and

Production Workplaces

Author: Hafez Shurrab

II

TABLE OF CONTENT

1. BACKGROUND __________________________________________ 1

2. ARGUMENTATION & SCOPE SIGNIFICANCE ________________ 1

3. ANALYSIS & DISCUSSION ________________________________ 3

3.1. IT & Industrial Society ___________________________________ 3

3.2. IS in Business Development ______________________________ 5

3.3. System Thinking _______________________________________ 8

3.4. System Design _________________________________________ 9

4. CONCLUSION ___________________________________________ 10

References ___________________________________________________ 11

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1. BACKGROUNDThe age demographics of Europe population reflect a serious future

challenge, especially for production and manufacturing workplaces. Figure 1

shows the distribution of ages over the European population of 2012. As time

goes by, the oldest categories will be retiring from their jobs and the

preceding age ranges will be moving further. As exhibited, most of the

population lies in the middle, i.e. between 35-60 years, which in the one hand

means that there will be a staffing problem from the differences between

these shifting bars in near future, and from the other hand, the valuable tacit

knowledge of the elderly should be extracted and retained to the use of

younger generations. Such challenges are especially aggravated for the

production and manufacturing industry (Berlin et al., 2013). Many literatures

addressed the diminishing interests of young people in Europe in permanent

production and manufacturing employments due to the gruelling physical and

cognitive work requirements (Karltun, 2007), which is not sustainable from

the perspective of the majority of researchers (Berlin et al., 2013; Pinheiro et

al., 2013). Figure 1 leads to two main implications:

One is that we have to start designing factories and workplaces so that the elderly can make the best use of the refill of sand in their hourglass. After all, it is less likely that they will do that autonomously

by dropping them in one pool.

Current and future young labour have/will be having developed needs

pertaining to working conditions in light of the unstoppable evolution

of technology development, especially for jobs commonly perceived

as physically and mentally demanding, e.g. production and

manufacturing.

Figure 1: Age Demographics of Europe Population - (Euro Commission, 2014)

2. ARGUMENTATION & SCOPE SIGNIFICANCEInformation systems (ISs) are more than ever getting involved in

manufacturing and production processes (Krstev & Zdravev, 2013). It is

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widely believed that ISs are a key for sustainable manufacturing and

production processes from economic, environmental, and societal perspective

(Coady, Berg & Pooley, 2013; Krstev & Zdravev, 2013). Moreover,

Dahlbom (1996) discussed interesting turning points in the trajectory of

informatics development over last eight decades. He came to a conclusion

that all these phases of development have been reformed in order to put a

technology to good use, and that informatics field is not about developing the

computing abilities and their packages and format, it is rather a discipline

leading and tracking purposively the development of information technology

(IT) with intention to beneficially integrate its advantages to the society. And

since the industrial society is rather large in Europe – 9% of EU GDP is

generated by the manufacturing sector (Euro Commission, 2014) – investigating the opportunities that informatics can bring to the

manufacturing and production arena in terms of business excellence and

sustainable working conditions are enormously significant.

For a firm level, enabling stable environment is one highly appreciated

pain reliever for any manufacturing/production engineer/manager (Nguyen,

2008). Better working conditions of manufacturing professions in turn mean

lower employees turnover, training cost, and injury and absenteeism rates.

Moreover, future generations will be more highly motivated to study and

blend in industrial sector as blue-collar workers.

Suchman (2002) highlighted one important lesson out of many from

practice-based design of ISs. He claims that technologies designed at distance

are incapable of efficiently and effectively matching the distant needs, and

there will be – as usual – substantial reworking to transform these

technologies into the desired state. Further, he follows this lesson by the

necessity to get users empowered in the design development of ISs/IT. This

means that directing efforts to dedicate IS with the aim of improving

manufacturing and production working conditions will more likely contribute

to a reverse effect concerning the development of the design of ISs

themselves. Enabling better working condition is user-oriented/micro-level

study after all. Based on all aforementioned indicators, this essay is dedicated

to investigate some examples of how informatics can contribute to socially

sustainable manufacturing and production workplaces. Four main themes are

discussed to approach this question including:

IT and society,

IS in business development,

system thinking,

and systems design.

This leads to breaking down the main research question into four questions,

whereby informatics will be substituted for each theme and investigated

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separately. Finally, the outcomes of the four themes will be connected and

collectively discussed, and a summary of the overall discussion will be

drawn.

3. ANALYSIS & DISCUSSION

3.1. IT & Industrial Society

IS is a core element of any production/transformation system, see figure 2.

The value of information and computing abilities stems from the fact that the

majority, if not all, of the industrial activities are connected together using

particular communication means and patterns. In production systems, IT/IS is

used for designing, planning, and controlling production activities (Bellgran

& Safsten, 2010).

Figure 2: The Elements of a Production System - (Bellgran & Safsten, 2010)

Bradley (2010) presented a comprehensive generic convergence model on

ICT and psychosocial life environment in which she addresses main effects

on human beings and society. The dotted circles in figure 3 represent the

virtual mediation to converge ICT, life environment, life role, and

globalization. Each one of these aspects leave certain effects on humans

including identity and self-perception, social competence, creativity,

integrity, trust, dependency, and vulnerability. Therefore, addressing the

question of how informatics can contribute to socially sustainable

manufacturing and production workplaces is fairly important due to the many

possibilities that IT integration may negatively affect humans in individual,

group/organization, and society levels.

Bradly (2010) singled out the industrialized world in terms of the accelerated

tempo if effects caused by integrating IT. At the one extreme, the use of IT in

production elevated the industrial capacities and automated the information

flows (Bellgran & Safsten, 2010). At the other extreme, IT applications

contributed to the stress phenomena highlighted by Bradly (2010) whereby

new challenges emerged including contact overload, information overload,

lack of organisational filters, demands for availability, changing level of

expectations, difficulty in separating “noise” from essentials, and an altered

perception of space and time in general. Therefore,

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use of IT in any industrial workplace may only change the nature of stress

from mentally/physically perspective concerned to different configurations of

mental stress. This interprets why Suchman (2002) is concerned by the

centrality of IT development away from users, which might lead to negative

social sustainability in industrial workplaces. However, the convergence

model discussed above could be conceptually used to check if a certain

development of an IT application will really improve our life from all

perspectives, leading to a balanced development towards social sustainability.

Figure 3: Convergence Model on ICT & Psychosocial Life Environment - (Bradley 2010)

On the other hand, in order to match the convergence model with another

model dedicated to the manufacturing context, the socially sustainable

ecosystem model suggested by SO SMART ECO SYSTEM consortium

(Chalmers, 2014) comes into the play, see figure 4. Through this model,

IT/IS developers and designers can keep the balance along the development

process taking into account the individual life-balance case, society business

case, and industry business case in order to fulfil both commercial and

political interests.

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Figure 4: Social Sustainable Ecosystem in Manufacturing Context – (Chalmers, 2014)

3.2. IS in Business Development

Investing in ISs to improve the industrial working conditions should not stand

alone if social sustainability is to be considered. There are basic and advance

business requirements that should be fulfilled or exceeded simultaneously,

see figure 4. In general, the business use of IT may include storing a lot of

date and information, automating decision making and other types of

processes, planning and following up the business, and overcoming

competitors through creating closer relationships with suppliers and

customers. However, the information to be considered should meet success

criteria such as to be relevant, up-to-date (timely) accurate (free from errors),

conforming with the user needs, friendly to use and understand, cost and time

worthy, and reliable. Nonetheless, there are hundreds of ISs that have been

developed and standardized to take care of the business responsibilities such

as ERP systems, whereby the flow of information between all business

processes in an organization is facilitated. Each group of IT-systems have

particular business functions in the value chain, which might be overlapping,

leading to difficulties in sorting out which system will be more value-adding

to a particular context. For instance, ERP has six primary business functions

including accounting and controlling, HR management, production and

materials management, project management, quality management and plant

maintenance, and sales and distribution (Parthasarathy, 2007). According to

Rainer (2014), the required information among different management levels

differs in terms of function support and being structured, see figure 5.

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Figure 5: A four level pyramid model of different types of information systems based on

the different levels of hierarchy in an organization – (Rainer, 2014)

Such levelling of information use and characteristics might be of relevance

from management perspective, while little confusing or less significant to

consider from industrial perspective. Bellgran and Safsten (2010) discussed

many perspectives of production system development in which ISs represent

a core element. One perspective is to be considered for this essay, which is

the production system life-cycle perspective, see figure 6. This perspective

represents the framework whereby changes are injected to any production

system. Therefore, it becomes easier to have this perspective as a background

when choosing, developing, and synchronizing of any information and IT

system to be considered (Fabian, 2006).

Figure 6: The Life-Cycle of Production Systems - (Bellgran & Safsten, 2010)

In the design phase of production systems, there are many tools used for

factor layout (e.g. Virtual 3D Layout TM) by simulating conceptual thoughts

in a 3D visualized environment in order to organize and structure flows and

team work and ensure safety when the design is to be realized. Another

example is ergonomics simulation, whereby tasks and motion studies are

simulated to investigate their health implications on operators in the long-

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term. The simulation includes the interaction of the operator with any object

in his/her proximity such as machines, robots, forklifts, materials, shelves,

tools, and equipment (Fabian, 2006). In line with the virtual trends in

production systems, Bradly (2010) depicted that in her convergence model

and expected more and more switch of tools and methods into virtualization.

One important benefit of information and computing capabilities that ISs

offer stem from converting manual tools into digital integrated tools in which

outcomes are tightly connected together to optimize the overall performance

of a system or product (Dahlbom, 1996). Likewise, in production and

manufacturing systems, IT applications revolutionized the stressful pen-and-

paper tools causing a quantum leap concerning the working conditions, and

leading to new frontiers of socially sustainable manufacturing, see figure 7.

To further clarify how IS and IT application enabled improved social

sustainability performance in manufacturing facilities, Life Cycle Analysis

(LCA) can be a good example. LCA is a time-consuming method used to

track the sources of emissions and calculate their weights along a product life

cycle. This means going through production processes and operations from

raw material extraction until the finished product is to be recycled or disposal

(Rebitzer et al., 2004). Nevertheless, user-interface LCA software connected

to massively large databases are rapidly growing embracing enormous types

of emission rates related to uncountable origin-based types of production,

manufacturing, energy and transportation operations, which enables much

faster and iterative LCA investigation (Jensen, 1998).

Figure 7: Engineering tools in the life-cycle of Production Systems - (DELFOi, 2014)

The broad set of possible IT applications and ISs to use throughout the

life-cycle of a production system in addition to the need of customization

makes it imperative to consider evaluation models (Bellgran & Safsten,

2010). Leeuw and Furubo (2008) suggested four main criteria to be

embedded in any evaluation model including the existence of a distinctive

epistemology perspective, the evaluation activities to be carried out by

evaluators within organizational structures and institutions, the performance,

and the intended use of evaluation results. Similarly, in manufacturing and

production environment, different evaluation models are used based on the

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outcomes. For instance, the efficiency of the system is evaluated through

system analysis model whereby the methods include linear programming,

planned variation, and comparison between cost and result (Bellgran &

Safsten, 2010).

Finally, integrating all of the different IT applications and ISs into one

central platform is one of the promising organizational capabilities that is in

line with future development. The term used to express about this new

technology is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) (Parthasarathy, 2007).

One of the most interesting potentials that such technology can introduce is

the significant increase of the organizational connectivity. More specifically,

employees and operators may be able to use mobile devices to carry out the

majority of their daily work off the desk. That is possible by connecting the

outcomes of engineering ISs with application programming interface (API).

Communication patterns can be adjusted so that each profession read such

outcomes in the language they prefer (e.g. the financial department only

receives the language of costs or so) (Mostafaeipour & Roy, 2011).

3.3. System Thinking

Integrating new IS/IT into new industrial contexts will more likely require

mature understanding of very complex incomplete situations. Therefore,

comprehending such situations using tools and methods that have been

developed using the system thinking property of informatics might be of

relevance to consider in this essay. Soft system methodology (SSM) is an

approach for tackling messy, problematic situations whatever they are. The

idea of this approach is that users are involved in an action-oriented process

of inquiry into problematic situations and they learn their way from figuring

out the situation, and then they take actions to improve it. SSM has many

specific techniques, one of them is termed Rich Pictures in which

underspecified and complex situations are drawn to capture entities,

structures, viewpoints, processes recognized, and potential issues. In other

words, it is a rather simple but comprehensive picture of a situation that may

be based on different worldviews (Checkland & Poulter, 2010).

Rehmann et al. (2011) believe that Rich Picture technique will be more

and more used by engineers of tomorrow in manufacturing and production

workplaces. They claim that by identifying connections between elements

included in Rich Pictures developed by manufacturing and production actors,

the relationships with causal loop diagrams can be explained, and the key

variables’ behavior in the production system can be over time sketched.

Besides, one important similarity makes ISs and industrial activities

sympathetic to each other is the fact that both fields embed system thinking

as central aspect. Therefore, Rich Pictures could be of relevance to use in

industrial environment, especially in light of high level of uncertainty and

innovation-driven atmosphere. Besides, Rich Pictures technique is expected

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to contribute to the balance discussed by Bradly (2010) regarding the

convergence model in which ICT is contributing to a balance between

emotional vs rational components of life, female vs male aspects, and

involvement vs alienation. The latter is in my opinion where Rich Pictures

may mostly contribute in terms of stress release and psychosocial aspects

since user involvement in light of complex situations would more likely

release pressure in the individual level.

3.4. System Design

Given that systems are designed to enable different types of users to do their

daily tasks simpler and contribute to the business excellence, defining

different system functionalities to serve a broad set of different users is very

tricky. As mentioned in section 3.1, Suchman (2002) predicts functional

inefficacy of systems that are designed and developed with limited

engagement of the real users of the systems. This failure becomes even more

probable when ISs are integrated to facilitate the performance of production

and manufacturing systems, since the unfamiliarity element might make it

demanding for operators to correctly leverage the ISs.

The Scandinavian design approach has standing traditions of getting users

involved in the early stages of system design (Elovaara et al., 2006). What

enabled this approach to thrive in Scandinavia could be the democratization

of working life and development process, cooperation on equal terms, and

giving space to all voices (Bjerknes & Bratteteig, 1995). Bratteteig et al.

(2012) claims that participation is one of the best ways to achieve mutual

learning between system designers and users (and actors), and co-realization

of a system. Simonsen and Robertson (2012, p.2) in turn define the

participatory design (PD) as

“A process of investigating, understanding, reflecting upon,

establishing, developing, and supporting mutual learning between

multiple participants in collective ‘reflection-inaction”

Use-oriented design cycle comprises many phases that form a closed loop

iterations to converge PD. According to Bratteteig et al. (2012), the cycle

starts from realizing a real life situation, and then understating the

practice/context of the system. After that, user/actor needs/wishes should be

identified, and the specified requirements should be make explicit

accordingly before concretising and testing the resultant system. The cycle is

iterated over and over again until an acceptable efficiency level of

functionality is reached.

Sanders (2008) discussed many design research methodologies in which

human factors & ergonomics as well as lead-user innovation are found to be

not completely in line with the concept of PD. Therefore, it would be quite

interesting to investigate how more and more production and manufacturing

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design methodologies will perform if they become based on PD. What makes

the interesting is that IT & ISs will more and more be integrated in

production planning, monitoring, controlling and implementing, and thus,

more and more users will be asked to interact with these system. Moreover,

all users’ need/wishes should be connected and consistent. To ensure such

connectivity, the method and techniques used in PD – such as probes, card

methods and storyboard – should be done collectively, which a challenge for

production and manufacturing context. Conducting activities with a sample

represents the whole user structure in the same time could be difficult, but

definitely not impossible.

4. CONCLUSIONIn this essay, some examples of how informatics can contribute to socially

sustainable manufacturing and production workplaces backed up by four main themes including IT and society, IS in business development, systems

thinking, and systems design were discussed.

The development of IS and IT can provide the industrial society with

significant momentum towards socially sustainable ecosystem through being

properly aligned with individual life case, industry business case, and society

business case.

There are already many tools and applications of IT contribute to the

social sustainability from a technical perspective along the production life-

cycle. More and more virtual tools are considered in the design and planning

phases, which means that more and more social aspects can be considered in

the earliest stages of production development.

Despite of all available IS/IT tools and application in the industrial

context, there is still a challenge in comprehending complex situations

surrounded by high uncertainty or are innovation demanding. For

newcomers, especially the young labour force, this is a common problem

even if the situation is not really problematic. However, as a technique of

SSM, Rich Pictures technique is expected to collectively enable industrial

operators to overcome complex problematic situations using the system

thinking property of informatics.

Finally, since more and more new system users and actors are expected to

accompany the further integration of IS/IT into the industrial context, leading

to a higher complexity in system design requirements. The PD embeds a

potential to encounter this complexity challenge in a productive way since

users’ needs are reached using participatory techniques. Besides, PD has

proven its worthiness in many cases, especially in Scandinavia, which makes

it recommended to be applied in the Scandinavian industrial sector.

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