Planning, scheduling and control from a sociotechnical perspective

Abstract

Industrial planning, scheduling and control (PSC) is understood as a task performed within sociotechnical systems. Nevertheless it is argued that the ‘classical’ sociotechnical systems approach fails in supporting design of PSC-systems, because it mainly focuses on demarcating tasks and allocating them to primary work systems and to individuals. However, it gives little advice on how to design the co-ordination of such demarcated tasks, which is the main aim of PSC. To compensate for that shortage the concept of secondary work systems is proposed together with design criteria. The concept and the criteria are confronted with reality in an exploratory case study.