Testing Operator Support Tools for a Global Production Strategy

Globalisation of industry puts new demands on technologies and instructions to work in different time-space contexts. This paper examines four different support tools that can be used for different time-space contexts: face-to-face instructor (same time-same place), remote guidance with augmented reality (same time-different place), movie-based instructions and text-picture based instructions (different time-same place). Experiments of simulated product assembly were conducted to measure assembly time, product quality and the operators’ subjective emotions of the support tools. In total, 46 number of tests were conducted. Results indicate that the different support tools have both advantages and disadvantages, and therefore selecting appropriate support tools is dependent of the situation.