Seminars

ME/IE 8773-8774
INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING DIVISION SEMINAR SERIES
Operations Research
Host: William L. Cooper

Workforce Agility in Production and Service Operations Systems

by

Seyed M. R. Iravani
Assistant Professor
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Northwestern University

Wednesday, March 24, 2004
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Room 1130 ME
Coffee and cookies will be available at 3:15 p.m. before the seminar

Abstract: Most traditional production system design is based on the idea that workers are tied to specific tasks or workstations. This notion has deep roots in philosophies such as standardization of work and division of labor, which were introduced during the industrial revolution. These concepts naturally evolved into rigid production systems, which could not respond adequately to changes in demand. However, to survive in the current intensive global competition, new strategies have evolved that are much more flexible. For example, Toyota introduced the idea of adapting to demand changes through attaining flexibility in the number of workers. This is called Shojinka in Japanese. The main factor in Shojinka is to use agile (cross-trained) workers who have the proper skills to perform different tasks, and therefore they can be in charge of more than one workstation.
The difficulty in modeling production systems with agile workers is that we must combine the complications of modeling rigid production systems with the complexity of scheduling the agile workers. The first step in analyzing these complex production systems is to obtain insight by developing models for systems that are smaller yet similar. Theretofore, in the first part of this talk, we focus on the scheduling problem of an agile (fully cross-trained) worker in a serial production system. Then, in the second part we introduce an Index that is capable of measuring the flexibility achieved through workforce agility. We present examples in production systems (e.g. Conwip lines) as well as service operations systems (e.g. Call Centers) and show that our deterministic Index can accurately predict the performance of stochastic production or service systems with agile workforce.

Bio: Seyed Iravani is Pentair-Nugent professor of manufacturing in the Industrial Engineering department at Northwestern University. He got his Ph.D. from University of Toronto, and worked as postdoctoral fellow in the Industrial and Operations Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He has been working with GM, Ford, and Motorola on several projects related to the design and control issues of work and knowledge management systems. His research interests are in the applications of stochastic processes and queueing theory in production and service operations systems. He is on editorial board of IIE Transactions and also serves as associate editor for Management Science.

Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday, March 24, 2004, 12:00 noon. Meet in 1100 ME and walk to lunch with other faculty. Prof. Seyed Iravani will be able to attend.