Description
During training of manual assembly operations, all employees experience continuous improvement caused
by learning. This improvement is known as learning behaviour and describes individual improvement of
competence and skill. In an assembly system, employees are required to learn various tasks to ensure overall
productivity. Job rotation supports the constant change of tasks to enable an environment where employees
maintain their skills by changing tasks in defined time-frames. Functional flexibility describes how many
employee-workstation-combinations are possible and needs to be determined based on internal and external
factors. Especially employee specific risks are predominant in terms of affecting the outcome and can be
encountered by considering these risks when determining the level of functional flexibility. This paper
provides an approach to assess employee specific risks with the goal to deduct an expected impact. An
overall approach describes the process in order to implement a software-tool to determine the level of
functional flexibility. The result is considered as a tool to support the decision-making process of leaders
and executives in production systems regarding determining a necessary competence matrix.
