VIABILITY ANALYSIS OF AD-HOC DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA TRAINING SYSTEMS FOR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS

Summary:

The limited progress accomplished in continual and vocational training, particularly in the lower hierarchical levels of the firms and most significantly among the direct production workers, is among the major stumbling blocks hindering the attainment of the required productivity and competitive levels.

This shortcoming is due to the obstacles that traditional training approaches face in production environments, such as the difficulties inherent to removing production workers from their workplace (high pressure working environment, tightly coupled tasks, direct impact on the company results, productivity related worker bonus, etc.) and the peculiarities of the training requirements of these workers (knowledge required is highly specific, volatile and poorly structured).

These problems are compounded by the gradual adoption by the companies of new techniques and management philosophies, such as TQM (Total Quality Management) or TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), based on ever higher involvement of the production workers in activities that had hitherto been carried out by other departments. Those philosophies require that production workers (and not just the maintenance specialists or the quality inspectors) take responsibility for activities aimed at the global quality improvement and overall maintenance , respectively. However, assuming those duties requires additional skills and knowledge, characterized by their continuous evolution; for example, active involvement by production workers (who are the ones that know best the equipment they use) in maintenance activities might in turn lead to new, innovative preventive or remedial maintenance approaches that will then have to be taught to the rest.

A sensible approach to tackling those issues might be the utilization of the new multimedia technologies, whose recent rapid diffusion has been sparkled by technological advances and plummeting costs, coupled with the ubiquitous generalization of the information highways.

However, Spanish companies are not yet perceiving the ad-hoc development of tailored interactive distributed multimedia training applications, aimed at their specific, idiosyncrasyc and changing needs, as a technically and economically viable solution for the above mentioned issues.

Therefore, the objective of this study was to establish, and test through a prototype, whether ad-hoc multimedia distributed training tool development has already crossed the threshold of practical viability in production environments; that is, if for a medium size production facility it is not just feasible, but also sensible, to develop its own tailored training tool for its line workers, including multimedia content obtained (filmed, photographed, written) specifically at its premises.

The pilot application chosen was a training tool aimed at supporting the assumption by the production workers of a major postal classification center of basic maintenance activities, in line with the trends mentioned before while discussing Total Productive Maintenance.

The tool developed allows production workers to access, from their own workplace, complete, relevant and totally specific information related to the basic maintenance of their equipment. These basic tasks, even though simple, can have significant economic impact, particularly when long idle waiting times (until the specialized maintenance personnel arrives) can be avoided. Through the standard hypertext-based navigation, the operators can, when faced with a breakdown or a scheduled preventive maintenance activity (or while preparing for that during low activity periods), access the detailed step-by-step instructions, backed by pictures or videos taken while executing that activity in their own equipment. This is particularly important for these workers, for which extrapolating lessons from a different environment is particularly difficult.

The prototype includes two basic sections: local, on a CD-ROM, and remote, on a Web server in the production facility’s LAN. The core multimedia information on the maintenance activities is stored locally, on a facility-specific CD-ROM of which each access point (networked PC) has a copy. Thus, the worker can efficiently access, through a standard WWW browser, text, PCD images or MPEG video. The effectiveness of these media is in sharp contrast with the limited resources and effort required for their development (for a medium "appearance" quality level, more than sufficient for the intended use).

This locally stored hypertext information includes links to a facility-wide Web server (it could eventually be expanded to include links to other remote sites) that contains the volatile information, such as daily work schedules or preventive maintenance calendars by workplace. Additionally, given the evolving nature of the production environment, where new maintenance problems and solutions are constantly arising, this easy to update server contains the multimedia maintenance information related to activities included after the CD-ROM were created. These activities will have originated, to a large extent, from the production workers themselves; the system also includes a feedback and suggestion system. These distribution requirements led to the use of HTML for the construction of the application, rather than authoring tools such as Multimedia Toolbook or Authorware.

Results from this study, including the practical test through the prototype, suggest that the application to idiosyncrasyc, changing production environments of ad-hoc distributed multimedia training tool development has already reached the stage of practical viability; this enables new approaches to fostering the contribution of direct production workers to the company competitiveness. While weighing this decision, companies must take into account, in addition to development costs, the infrastructure hardware and network requirements (even though these are increasingly already present in production environments) as well as the costs associated with the people adaptation and acceptance of the change (which should be minimized by the friendly multimedia environment). At the same time, additional side benefits deriving from the workers feeling of involvement, fostered by the enlarged responsibilities and from features such as the feedback and suggestion systems that can be implemented in these applications, should be expected.