Chained cross-training of workers for robust performance.: An article from: IIE Transactions
Book Details
ISBN / ASINB00084CGCI
ISBN-13978B00084CGC4
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
This digital document is an article from IIE Transactions, published by Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE) on October 1, 2004. The length of the article is 8785 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
From the author: Training workers to perform multiple tasks can improve workforce agility for dealing with variations in workload. However, cross-training can be costly, time consuming to implement, is limited by worker learning capacity, and can lead to ambiguity about work responsibilities. Therefore, it is important to implement cross-training in the most efficient way and especially, due to the training time required, in a way that is robust to system changes. We use queueing and simulation analysis to investigate cross-training in the context of maintenance in a manufacturing plant. The tasks are independent and can be represented as a set of parallel queues that are served by dedicated and cross-trained workers. We propose a cross-training strategy called chaining, in which a few workers are strategically cross-trained, and show that it yields most of the benefits of cross-training all workers, with much less effort. Most importantly, we demonstrate that cross-training workers to form a "complete chain" is extremely robust in the following ways: (i) it is insensitive to the variety of ways a complete chain can be formed; (ii) it performs well even if there are major changes to or uncertainty in system parameters (such as mean task arrival rates); and (iii) performance is insensitive to control decisions that, without complete chaining, can significantly harm performance.
Citation Details
Title: Chained cross-training of workers for robust performance.
Author: William C. Jordan
Publication:IIE Transactions (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2004
Publisher: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE)
Volume: 36 Issue: 10 Page: 953(15)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
From the author: Training workers to perform multiple tasks can improve workforce agility for dealing with variations in workload. However, cross-training can be costly, time consuming to implement, is limited by worker learning capacity, and can lead to ambiguity about work responsibilities. Therefore, it is important to implement cross-training in the most efficient way and especially, due to the training time required, in a way that is robust to system changes. We use queueing and simulation analysis to investigate cross-training in the context of maintenance in a manufacturing plant. The tasks are independent and can be represented as a set of parallel queues that are served by dedicated and cross-trained workers. We propose a cross-training strategy called chaining, in which a few workers are strategically cross-trained, and show that it yields most of the benefits of cross-training all workers, with much less effort. Most importantly, we demonstrate that cross-training workers to form a "complete chain" is extremely robust in the following ways: (i) it is insensitive to the variety of ways a complete chain can be formed; (ii) it performs well even if there are major changes to or uncertainty in system parameters (such as mean task arrival rates); and (iii) performance is insensitive to control decisions that, without complete chaining, can significantly harm performance.
Citation Details
Title: Chained cross-training of workers for robust performance.
Author: William C. Jordan
Publication:IIE Transactions (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2004
Publisher: Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE)
Volume: 36 Issue: 10 Page: 953(15)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
