Shop Floor Control as a Task of Organizational Development

Abstract

Flexible, self-regulating, (semi-) autonomous, decentralized cells, fractals or teams, in which independent, intrinsically motivated individuals enterprising in thought and in action are current concepts intended to insure that manufacturers will be able to react adequately to the increasing dynamic nature and complexity of production conditions. Management theories based upon the principles of “Cybernetics I”(see Staehle 1994, p. 41), which aim to eliminate variations and disturbances by means of preventive systems oriented towards stability and balance, have increasingly given way to theories built on “Cybernetics II”. The premise of these is that only by increasing the system’s tolerance for failures and instabilities can an adequate strategy for mastering the problems facing management be found (Staehle 1994, p. 41, see also Scherer 1996). The goal of modern management cannot be the reduction, or avoidance, of complexity, but rather complexity must be mastered by means of appropriate system design. Stated simply, for shop floor control this means that planning and control tasks are no longer carried out in central, higher-level departments uncoupled from manufacturing operations, but rather, that these tasks must be executed whenever possible by the manufacturing islands themselves. Only this can guarantee that there are sufficient degrees of freedom in manufacturing for complex events to be mastered. Where there is no such freedom, manufacturing has to depend upon complexity-reduction internal to the system in the form of, for example, deterministic systems production planning and control systems (PPC).