The thesis analyses the relationship between shop-floor militancy and union politics in the period after the birth of "new unionism" in Brazil in the 1980s and addresses the problems and dilemmas faced by this new type of union movement. It is based on a case study of steelworkers at the National Steel Company and their representative union, the Metal workers' Union of Volta Redonda, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The research design has emphasised qualitative methods such as in-depth interviewing and field observation. The researcher has also made use of the computer in the analysis of data, through a new type of computer software which is being introduced in sociological research. The objectives of the thesis are two-fold. First, it offers an in-depth study of the relationship between shop-floor politics and union politics in a steel plant. The theoretical framework is based on the concept of "politics of production" introduced by Michael Burawoy, and on the debate around levels of leadership representation of union members, as inaugurated by Robert Michels. The second objective is to assess the developments of "new unionism" in Brazil, ten years after its birth, and to discuss the extent to which it has actually broken with populist and bureaucratic types of unionism and advanced towards more democratic forms of union politics. With the knowledge available today of national level politics, it is possible to argue that in the course of the 1980s the "new unionist" movement developed a significantly more legitimate and democratic relationship between union leaders and their base, and that this helped to break with the "regulated citizenship" of working-class groups in society by expanding their labour rights, by successfully pressing for changes in the Labour Code and by participating in national level politics. The analysis of the case study suggests that the contribution of the new union movement was especially significant in the politicised use of the CIPA (Internal Committee for the Prevention of Accidents) and in the innovative use of the Labour Courts. The significance of these dimensions was that they involved an attempt to expand workers' rights as well as to create new bases under which the rights were granted. On the other hand, the case study suggests that the internal dynamics of the "new union" movement still have elements which may be characterised as non-democratic, and that this generated a new set of problems and dilemmas for organised labour in Brazil for the 1990s.

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Introduction: Competition increases and companies need to adjust their business to stay competitive. Employees have gained an important for an or-ganisation and are often seen as the key to business success. Motiva-tion is important for increased performance. A reward system can, amongst other things, help an organisation to motivate, attract and retain their employees. Historically, rewards have concerned mostly senior management. We where interested in how a reward system could affect people further down in the hierarchy. How can a reward system influence motivation in small shop-floor business units? What are the benefits and possible pitfalls with a reward system for such a setting? Purpose: The purpose of this report is slightly wider than what the research questions suggest. By thoroughly investigating the motivating ele-ments we aim to create a frame of reference, which is thought to give insight into the important components of a reward system and the motivating factors. It is our aim that this frame will be applicable to other settings similar to the one which we will investigate. We also intend to look into what positive and negative aspects there are and how the disadvantages with a reward system can be minimized. Method: To fulfil our purpose we have chosen to perform a case study on the service unit of Hedin Göteborg Bil AB. In order to retrieve the necessary empirical data we have interviewed two managers and car-ried out a questionnaire amongst the thirteen service technicians. Results: In line with theory, we found that financial rewards it is not the prime source for motivation; there are many factors that play a lar-ger role. Some of the most motivating factors turned out to be col-leges, autonomy and responsibility, fun and rewarding work tasks. More interestingly, we saw a relation between many of these and the reward system, indicating that financial rewards enhance the motiva-tional effects of other factors. We found that there are several positive and negative aspects with any reward system. The case study presented solutions to many of the possible pitfalls and indicated that they benefited from their cur-rent reward system.

<p>Introduction: Competition increases and companies need to adjust their business to stay competitive. Employees have gained an important for an or-ganisation and are often seen as the key to business success. Motiva-tion is important for increased performance. A reward system can, amongst other things, help an organisation to motivate, attract and retain their employees. Historically, rewards have concerned mostly senior management. We where interested in how a reward system could affect people further down in the hierarchy.</p><p>How can a reward system influence motivation in small shop-floor business units?</p><p>What are the benefits and possible pitfalls with a reward system for such a setting?</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this report is slightly wider than what the research questions suggest. By thoroughly investigating the motivating ele-ments we aim to create a frame of reference, which is thought to give insight into the important components of a reward system and the motivating factors. It is our aim that this frame will be applicable to other settings similar to the one which we will investigate. We also intend to look into what positive and negative aspects there are and how the disadvantages with a reward system can be minimized.</p><p>Method: To fulfil our purpose we have chosen to perform a case study on the service unit of Hedin Göteborg Bil AB. In order to retrieve the necessary empirical data we have interviewed two managers and car-ried out a questionnaire amongst the thirteen service technicians.</p><p>Results: In line with theory, we found that financial rewards it is not the prime source for motivation; there are many factors that play a lar-ger role. Some of the most motivating factors turned out to be col-leges, autonomy and responsibility, fun and rewarding work tasks. More interestingly, we saw a relation between many of these and the reward system, indicating that financial rewards enhance the motiva-tional effects of other factors.</p><p>We found that there are several positive and negative aspects with any reward system. The case study presented solutions to many of the possible pitfalls and indicated that they benefited from their cur-rent reward system.</p>

In the light of the complex and dynamic factors that exist in a typical production facility, manual development of an optimal shop-floor schedule is computationally impractical. This paper discusses the effective use of an heuristic algorithm approach to shop-floor scheduling at the TRW Rack and Pinion Division (RPD) Plant in Rogersville, Tennessee. The study documents the introduction of FAST, a computerised scheduling system that employs the Genetic Optimisation Algorithm. Results demonstrate a real potential advantage using this system for shop-floor scheduling, thus facilitating TRWs journey of continuous improvement.

<p>During the 1990s two contrasting paths to the organization of work have emerged in the Swedish engineering industry: the structure-conservative and structure-innovative. This thesis deals with the latter, and focuses primarily on necessary changes in management control systems that support structureinnovative forms of team-organized work. Three types of management control systems are studied in this thesis: performance management and measurement systems, systems for continuous improvements and wage systems.</p><p>The empirical base of this thesis consists of data from an exploratory survey study as well as a multiple case study.</p><p>On a general level, the survey study indicates a lack of congruence between structure and systems. Many companies seem to have started to move along the structure-innovative path but have not changed the management control systems accordingly. However, there are good reasons for doing so. The companies that have chosen the structure-innovative path perform better in terms of productivity, quality and cost reduction. These are also the companies that have changed their management control systems to the greatest extent.</p><p>The case study provides examples of how management control systems may be changed to fit structure-innovative forms of team-organized work. The main focus has been on the use of Balanced Scorecard. How a strategic continuous improvement capability was developed and sustained in the studied companies is illustrated. The findings extend previous research on new production concepts, which, this thesis argues, are not to be regarded as an issue of technology and vertical division of labour only, but also of supportive management control systems.</p> / QC 20100525

<p>One of the universal characteristics of all organization concerns their attempts to achieve high product quality at low price. For that reason, the contemporary organizations direct their attempts to improve the utilization of workers’ potential and adopt the line-stopping strategies at the shop .The research presented in this thesis aims at analyzing and revealing to what extent the decisions at the shop floor depend on operators. The conclusions drawn in this paper contribute to determination of the scope of operators’ responsibilities and examination of the ways in which workers maintain the process uninterrupted. The role of operators for attaining the desired product quality is presented as well. These objectives have been accomplished through theoretical work.</p>

Em um ambiente produtivo, a falta de informações confiáveis cria, muitas vezes, uma imagem do chão-de-fábrica que não retrata a realidade, comprometendo o desempenho e diminuindo a agilidade da empresa. Neste contexto, um sistema de supervisão do chão-de-fábrica, capaz de fornecer informações confiáveis e de forma rápida, pode ser um grande diferencial para manter a competitividade das empresas de manufatura. Este trabalho sistematiza visões e conceitos que auxiliam na implantação de sistemas de supervisão do chão-de-fábrica em empresas que utilizam operações de usinagem no seu processo produtivo. Além disso, apresenta o desenvolvimento e a implantação deste sistema na Fábrica Integrada Modelo (FIM) do Núcleo de Manufatura Avançada (NUMA) da Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos - USP. / The lack of reliable information in a production environment creates a wrong image of the shop floor, affecting the plant\'s agility and its performance. A shop floor supervisory system, able to provide, in a fast way, that sort of information, can enhance the competitiveness of the manufacturing plant. The present work shows visions and concepts that can give support to the implementation of shop floor supervisory system in manufacturing plants. lt also presents the development and implementation of this kind of system in the lntegrated Model Plant (FIM) of the Advanced Manufacturing Nucleus (NUMA) at São Carlos - University of São Paulo.

O desempenho dos sistemas de Planejamento e Controle de Produção e dos sistemas de Planejamento e Controle de Chão-de-Fábrica é fortemente dependente da qualidade e confiabilidade dos dados de operação e da rapidez com que estes dados são obtidos para análise e acompanhamento da execução dos planos de produção. O processo de coleta e tratamento destes dados tem sido pouco detalhado nos modelos de referência encontrados na literatura. Este trabalho posicionou a utilização de sistemas supervisórios para a coleta de dados de produção em sistemas de planejamento e controle no ambiente da manufatura discreta, propondo um roteiro de atividades a serem consideradas no desenvolvimento de sistemas de planejamento. / The Production Planning and Control Systems and Shop Floor Control Systems performance are extremely dependent of the quality and reliability of the operational data and readiness in data collection process, in order to provide information to analyse the execution of production plans. The data collection process has been pour detailed in the reference models found in literature. This work locates the supervisory and control data acquisition systems role in the landscape of discrete manufacturing planning systems and proposes a routing of tasks to be considered in developing process of a manufacturing planning system.

To cope with dynamics and uncertainties, a novel penalty function-based hybrid, multi-agent shop floor control system is proposed in this dissertation. The key characteristic of the proposed system is the capability of adaptively distributing decision-making power across different levels of control agents in response to different levels of disturbance. The subordinate agent executes tasks based on the schedule from the supervisory level agent in the absence of disturbance. Otherwise, it optimizes the original schedule before execution by revising it with regard to supervisory level performance (via penalty function) and disturbance. Penalty function, mathematical programming formulations, and quantitative metrics are presented to indicate the disturbance levels and levels of autonomy. These formulations are applied to diverse performance measurements such as completion time related metrics, makespan, and number of late jobs. The proposed control system is illustrated, tested with various job shop problems, and benchmarked against other shop floor control systems. In today's manufacturing system, man still plays an important role together with the control system Therefore, better coordination of humans and control systems is an inevitable topic. A novel BDI agent-based software model is proposed in this work to replace the partial decision-making function of a human. This proposed model is capable of 1) generating plans in real-time to adapt the system to a changing environment, 2) supporting not only reactive, but also proactive decision-making, 3) maintaining situational awareness in human language-like logic to facilitate real human decision-making, and 4) changing the commitment strategy adaptive to historical performance. The general purposes human operator model is then customized and integrated with an automated shop floor control system to serve as the error detection and recovery system. This model has been implemented in JACK software; however, JACK does not support real-time generation of a plan. Therefore, the planner sub-module has been developed in Java and then integrated with the JACK. To facilitate integration of an agent, real-human, and the environment, a distributed computing platform based on DOD High Level Architecture has been used. The effectiveness of the proposed model is then tested in several scenarios in a simulated automated manufacturing environment.