Personnel planning in concurrent engineering: A case study

Abstract

Personnel planning is traditionally one of the last activities in the process of bringing a product to the market. This can lead to a lack of necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) on the shop floor often causing delays at the start of production. In Concurrent Engineering (CE), planning activities are integrated and information is frequently exchanged to avoid such problems. As job design determines the requirements for personnel planning, this article presents a method for integrating job design and personnel planning. This method makes it possible to define personnel requirements in early phases as well as designing jobs to the availability of personnel. It is based on a tool for modeling the task structure in the early phases, when information is still poorly defined, continuously adapting the task model to increasing levels of detail, and a method of directly deducing from the task structure the necessary KSA. The method is well suited to deal with poorly defined information; it allows the design of jobs, and considers personnel selection, education, and training concurrently to other planning activities. A case study is presented to demonstrate its use. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.