On the track of human errors - Procedure and results of an innovative assembly planning method

Manual assembly operations are the endmost place of the production process and with it represent a melting pot for organizational, time-related and qualitative errors of manufacturing. Because competitive advantages are increasingly determined in the manual assembly, the creation of economical and reliable work steps is of fundamental importance for future business success. For that reason, at the institute of the authors, a procedure has been developed to use the knowledge of the Expert System for Task Taxonomy that was originally developed to evaluate the error rate of control and surveillance activities in safety critical areas for creating a computer-aided expert system that allows predicting human error probabilities for manual assembly operations. Applying this expert system, production processes can already be optimized during the phase of product design by avoiding critical process steps at an early stage of the planning process. On the basis of a case study, this paper introduces the conception of an Excel-based software tool that allows an automated application of the developed assembly planning method and thereby, generates reliable risk analyses of manual work tasks with little expenditure of personnel and time.