Study of human factors in process improvement

Abstract

In the era of Industry 4.0, human is the most important factor which is actively involved in the process. And any improvement cannot be possible without human involvement. Human being and their interaction with machines, materials, systems, processes, and information are the baselines of quality and productivity improvement initiatives. If we consider stages of improvement humans will always come first, then process and equipment. It is found very easy to replace any equipment or machine if not performing well, or you can modify the process if you find out the root cause but, for people, this doesn’t work. We can easily change people working on the process but you cannot easily change the mindset of people working on that process. It has been always a challenge for top management to change the mindset of people and align it with the way they have planned things. We should give “clarity of thoughts”, an important aspect in the process of improvement. Next challenges that top management faces are concerning ASK, Attitude, Knowledge, and Skill. Attitude is inherent in the human being and is a settled way of thinking, we cannot easily change, or modify it. If we consider all resources 4M i.e., Men, Machine, Materials, and Method for identifying the potential root cause, the last three will not perform without the first one. The initial solution to this lies in managing the human factor in the Process to identify the latent cause. Thus, for working on change for betterment consider human factors change from resistance to acceptance. Roadmap for quality or productivity improvement with human factor goes along with values of human, motivation, engagement in the job and lead to job satisfaction. Human is that factor we cannot separate from any process and always comes first if, we want to improve upon quality and productivity.