The Reality of Shop Floor Control — Approaches to Systems Innovation

Abstract

One of the tasks of production planning and control (PPC) of an enterprise is to transform direct customer demands or marketing sales plans into production orders. It thus represents the interface between the external market of an enterprise and its internal, value-adding areas. The goal of PPC is to achieve the best possible correspondence between external demands and internal possibilities of the enterprise. As a rule, PPC is based on sequential-hierarchical procedures, which, step-wise, perform ever more detailed planning leading to implementation. It is the job of management at the operative level of the enterprise to make the final plan for the shop floor, in the form of a weekly or daily schedule for example, and to carry it out. Here management must take the actual, current situation in production and the availability of the individual resources required into account. But it must also examine whether or not the released orders and due dates, determined on the basis of sales predictions, are at all realistic. This task is called variously production activity control, operations management, or shop floor control. What these terms express in common is that the practice of control activities always has close structural links to other activities of operative management such as personnel management, interference management, maintenance and quality assurance; control places them in relation to one another. “The shop floor is understood as the locale of production activities” (Nullmeier & Brinkop 1991, p. 53), which shows the operative character of control activities and makes clear that shop floor control is a task within a physical environment.