۱- Introduction

۲- Theoretical background

۳- Methodology

۴- As-is situation in the case company

۵- Intervention

۶- Discussion

۷- Conclusion, limitations and future work

References

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reveal how information and communication technology (ICT) can empower shop floor workers in collaborative manufacturing environments. Design/methodology/approach – The authors gather data from a mobile maintenance department of a steel manufacturing company and apply the method of a scenario-based design. The authors use data from interviews, observations and company documents to create problem and activity scenarios. The authors also demonstrate the development of a worker-centric digital design in multiple demonstration and evaluation cycles.
Findings – The authors find that ICT can be used to ensure that empowerment is not only a concept, but can sustainably empower daily operations.
Research limitations/implications – The authors contribute to theory by showing how structural empowerment can be used as a guiding theoretical lens to design ICT for shop floor workers in collaborative manufacturing work environments. These implications are limited to findings from a single case study.
Practical implications – The results provide an overview of different empowerment dimensions, namely, the access to information, resources, support and opportunities, that can support employees in collaborative manufacturing environments. Originality/value – This paper is first in suggesting a framework of how ICT designs can be used to empower shop floor workers in collaborative manufacturing environments.

Introduction

Changing demands in the global markets lead manufacturing companies to increasingly transform previously mass-produced items into individualized products (Koren, 2010), thereby making the flexibility of production practices a key success factor of the twenty-first century (Nahmias and Olsen, 2015). To guarantee this flexibility, shop floor workers’ problem solving and decision-making capabilities become increasingly important (Secchi and Camuffo, 2016). In order to enable such capabilities, companies need to empower employees by providing adequate structural conditions (Hirzel et al., 2017). Following the call of Walker et al. (2015) to explore and apply adequate behavioral theories from other disciplines in operations management, we adopt the structural empowerment theory (Kanter, 1993) as a lens to provide guidance on such structural conditions. According to the theory, elements such as “access to resources” or “access to information” support employees in their self-determined activities. A number of studies have shown positive effects of employees’ structural empowerment such as higher commitment to the organization (Smith et al., 2010), higher job satisfaction (Wong and Laschinger, 2013) and higher work effectivity (Orgambídez-Ramos and Borrego-Alés, 2014). The theory of structural empowerment fits very well as we want to provide a rich account on the design alternatives.