Organisational Design and the (dis)Integration of Human Factors in Production System Development

This paper describes and generalises experiences from two cases of production system development in the Swedish context. We have observed the successful application of ergonomics to be related to the lack of coordination of human factors across groups responsible for different stages of the production system design process. This problem is magnified by the tendency for ‘ergonomics’ to be the responsibility of Human Resources departments who are distanced from they design process, rather than engineering teams directly engaged in design. Available tools to improve the integration of ergonomics considerations into the design process are briefly presented and discussed.