2020 Volume 71 Issue 2E Pages 81-91
Major studies on cell production have placed an emphasis on technical factors such as machine order/layout, family part grouping, work-flow sequence, etc. However, there have still been insufficient investigations as to how workers' aptitudes affect their performance in production cells. Intending to find the worker's aptitude closely relating to her/his performance in cell production, we design a laboratory experiment, and administer 11 paper-and-pencil tests of the Japanese General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) to the workers and measure their seven work-related aptitudes. We pay special attention to detecting outliers in the GATB scores and the cell production experiment results, and then examine the partial correlations between the workers' GATB scores and their performance. As the GATB scores can't directly measure a worker's aptitude towards the assembly tasks in production cells, we make use of principal component analysis and obtain a component score that correlates significantly with the workers' performance in cell production. As the result, we can apply this component score to measure a worker's aptitude towards the assembly tasks in cell production.
