=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1418/paper11
|storemode=property
|title=Collaborative Subject-oriented Workplace Re-design
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1418/paper11.pdf
|volume=Vol-1418
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/Francescomarino15
}}
==Collaborative Subject-oriented Workplace Re-design==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1418/paper11.pdf
Collaborative Subject-oriented Workplace Re-design?
Chiara Di Francescomarino1 , Mauro Dragoni1 , Chiara Ghidini1 , Richard Heininger2 ,
Udo Kannengiesser2 , and Matthias Neubauer3
1
FBK—IRST, Trento, Italy ghidini|dragoni|df mchiara@f bk.eu
2
Metasonic GmbH, Pfaffenhofen, Germany
richard.heininger|udo.kannengiesser@metasonic.de
3
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria matthias.neubauer@jku.at
Abstract. The demo paper introduces SURF , a tool for supporting the subject-
oriented redesign of workplaces in production companies. The collaborative tool,
inspired by the wiki and the subject-oriented philosophy, allows workers to raise
issues and suggest solutions to be exposed to managers for workplace re-design
purposes. The advantage of the tool is twofold. On the one hand it empowers
workers, making them aware and actively involved in the workplace re-design. On
the other hand, the tool makes management aware of actual problems occurring at
the shopfloor and of the suggestions proposed by workers, thus supporting them
in the effective re-design.
1 Introduction
Production companies are usually exposed to a variety of challenges that have often
been understood mostly in economic and technological terms by neglecting a critical
factor for sustainable organisational success: the human being. The result is a misalign-
ment between business goals and human factors, that can be attributed to a lack of sup-
port and encouragement for human participation, learning and personal development
within organisations [1].
The aim of the SO-PC-Pro (Subject-Orientation for People-Centred Production)
project is developing methods and tools for holistic design and management of work-
places in production companies, thereby aligning business goals and human needs.
Specifically, in this context, a “workplace” is defined as a physically or conceptually
distinguishable set of interactions between people, machines and processes within their
contexts (e.g., the interactions of individual in their physical surroundings, or of teams
of workers distributed across departments). The core of the project is the notion of
people-centredness, a particular characteristic or quality of a production workplace, de-
scribing a state in which the physical, socio-cultural, operational and economic work-
place environment is closely aligned with the needs of the people working in that en-
vironment. Striving for such a state is the goal of any production company concerned
about the well-being of its workers. The technologies developed within SO-PC-Pro aim
at supporting this quest based on a view of people-centredness as a process rather than
Copyright c 2015 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic
purposes.
?
This work is supported by the EU FP7 Programme under grant agreement 609190 - “Subject-
Orientation for People-Centred Production”.
a state of affairs, a view that takes into account the dynamics of both the production
environment and the workers. This paper presents the tool SURF 4 (Subject-oriented
sUggestions for Re-design of Factory workplaces) that aims at empowering people
in production companies, by making (i) workers active participants (or “subjects” in
the Subject-oriented business process management - S-BPM - methodology [2]) in the
workplace redesign process; (ii) managers aware of problems and supported by work-
ers in the workplace improvement. To this aim, SURF provides a collaborative, user-
friendly environment enabling workers to report and discuss issues and possible so-
lutions, a workflow engine making the suggestion process transparent to workers and
managers, and a process editor able to support designers and decision makers (i.e, the
company management) with workers’ suggestions, when a re-design effort is required.
2 Tool and Architecture
At the core of SURF are the S-BPM and the wiki philosophy. Subject-oriented business
process management [2] has been developed to empower the people involved in a pro-
cess, by providing them with tools for designing and improving their own workflows.
The methodology is inspired by natural language structure that consists of three com-
ponents: (i) subjects representing human workers; (ii) predicates representing activities
including sending and receiving messages, and performing tasks; (iii) objects repre-
senting the artefacts or data produced and exchanged between subjects. The idea is that
applying this modelling approach to interactions in the production domain will affect
psychological and social factors of human work [4]. Relying on the assumption that
workers have the deepest insights of the issues and opportunities related to their work-
places, and can most effectively decide what changes are needed to improve their work,
it assigns a dual role to people in organisations: one as process participants and one as
workplace re-designers. Workers are hence encouraged to collaborate towards the work-
place re-design. Supporting such a collaborative effort requires making workers aware
of the evolution of the modelled workplace, favouring the coordination within the team,
as well as fostering the communication of issues and ideas among the workers and with
the managers. These different collaborative (re-)design aspects may benefit from the
availability of wiki-inspired tools. Indeed, wikis typically offer easily customizable in-
terfaces for different types of users and some collaborative features (e.g., functionalities
for sharing, tracking and discussing ideas) which can be exploited to favour the kind of
collaboration needed for collecting knowledge for re-design purposes.
SURF is based on three main modules: the Suggestion Management and Discus-
sion, the S-BPM Workflow engine and the Re-design module. While the first two mod-
ules aim at involving workers in the active report of issues and suggestions for the
workplace improvement, the latter focuses on supporting managers and designers in
the actual workplace re-design.
Suggestion Management Module. This module is concerned with enabling users with
no IT background to report issues and suggestions, as well as to discuss and share opin-
ions about proposed suggestions or other topics, through simple interfaces. It provides
workers with the possibility to: (i) create and update issue and suggestion reports (see
4
A screencast showing the tool functionalities is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/
c2gz9gbi9vmwbji/SOPCPro_SURF.zip?dl=0
(a) Creation of a new suggestion (b) Suggestion Visualization and related functionalities
Fig. 1: Suggestion creation and visualization
Fig. 1a5 ), choosing whether and when to share them with colleagues and/or managers;
(ii) visualize the current state of their suggestion (pending, approved or rejected ) and
the current stage in the process of suggestion handling (e.g., the current manager in
charge of handling it), by making the suggestion handling process transparent to work-
ers and managers (see Fig. 1b); (iii) discuss and share with colleagues opinions about
proposed suggestions but also about other topics of interest; (iv) visualize issues and
suggestions shared by colleagues and express their opinion about them (see Fig. 1b).
Fig. 1a for instance shows the interface for reporting a suggestion. Workers can add
a description of the issue they have observed (e.g., in the procedure for the inspection
of the incoming goods manually moving the transportation document - DDT - is time
consuming) or (and) the suggestion proposed to solve the problem (e.g., buying a new
solution allowing for the automatic transfer of the DDT). Fig. 1b shows the view on
an existing suggestion. Besides the data added by workers, users can visualize the cur-
rent status of the report (pending, accepted or rejected ), the management’s feedback
(first feedback, final decision and rationale of the decision) and the number of col-
leagues supporting/non-supporting the report. For instance, in the example of Fig. 1b,
the suggestion has just been shared with the management. Indeed, no feedback has been
provided so far and the status is still pending. More details about the status of the cur-
rent suggestion is also available through the View Status button (Fig. 1b): A red circle
indicates the subject who is currently handling the suggestion, i.e., the stage of the sug-
gestion handling process for the considered suggestion (in the example the suggestion
has to be processed by the Quality Manager). Finally, colleagues of the proposer can
express their opinion about the suggestion through the I like/ I don’t like buttons and
discuss about it (the Discussion button opens a popup as in Fig. 1b to start or continue
a discussion on the topic).
S-BPM Workflow engine Module. This module is in charge of executing the sugges-
tion handling process. While running a S-BPM suggestion handling process specific
for the company’s needs, it enables managers and decision makers to process workers’
suggestions. Whenever a manager is in charge of giving feedback about a given issue or
5
A more readable version of the pictures in the paper can be downloaded at https://www.
dropbox.com/s/nvi1xypzkl72bhe/SOPCPro_SURF_figures.zip?dl=0
Fig. 2: Suggestion Approval
suggestion, according to the suggestion handling process, he/she is provided with the
Feedback button, which, in turn, will provide her with an input form. According to the
suggestion handling process indeed, it can happen that one or more managers are asked
to process a suggestion before ending up with the final decision. For instance, in the
example of the DDT document, the Warehouse, Quality and Purchase Manager can be
involved in the decision. Fig. 2 shows the input form for the Quality Manager (QM).
The Quality manager can provide her feedback about positive and negative aspects of
the suggestion as well as report the report the final decision taken, i.e., the status of the
suggestion (e.g., approved ), a textual description of the decision (e.g., “The suggestion
is accepted as it is.”) and the motivation (rationale) for the decision taken (e.g., “there
exist reasonably cheap solutions.”). The same feedback is then also reported to workers
in their suggestion view. Besides the Feedback button, decision makers are also pro-
vided with the Localization Analysis button (green button in Fig.2). By reasoning on
suggestion categories and on the available domain knowledge, the functionality associ-
ated to the button retrieves and shows to users the workers potentially affected by the
suggestion, thus supporting them in taking decisions.
Re-design module. The module offers a S-BPM editor enhanced with design func-
tionalities (Fig. 3). Depending on which element in the S-BPM diagram is selected, the
module provides designers in the Worker Issues tab with a list of issues and suggestions
relevant for the element selected in the editor. For instance, if the subject DDT Checker,
i.e., the responsible of checking the transportation document, is selected in the process
model describing the procedure for the inspection of incoming goods, the suggestions
related to this subject, such as the one about the DDT document, are provided to the
designer. Specifically the editor:
– displays the suggestions made by workers (e.g., “buying an automatic solution for
moving the DDT”). Being provided with a display of the workers’ issues and sug-
gestions side by side, the business designer has immediate access to possible solu-
tion alternatives.
– shows the rationale for previous decisions regarding workplace improvement. By
representing both current and previous issues, the editor also provides access to the
knowledge gained from previous improvement ideas and captured as the rationale
associated with previous decisions (i.e., Rationale field in Fig. 3);
– enables the ad-hoc ordering of workers’ issues to support the designer in identifying
connections among individual issues.
The SURF is built on top of two existing base technologies, the MoKi tool [3]
and the Metasonic suite6 , mirroring the philosophies at the base of the tool, the wiki-
6
https://www.metasonic.de/en
Fig. 3: S-BPM Editor
based collaborative environment and subject-orientation. The shared repository storing
issues and suggestions is used for the communication between the tool modules. Both
the Suggestion Management (MoKi-based) and S-BPM Workflow (Metasonic Flow)
modules read and write information from/to the shared suggestion repository, while the
S-BPM Editor (Metasonic Build) module only reads suggestions for providing them,
once filtered, to the designers.
3 Maturity and Relevance
The importance of humans in the BPM community is going to grow (BPM also hosts
workshops on social and human aspects and user-centric aspects are listed among the
fields of the emerging area topic in BPM 2015). SURF , by adopting the subject-oriented
notation for describing processes and actively involving workers in the (re)design of
workplaces, makes people-centredness one of its core concepts.
The SURF tool has been applied to the SO-PC-Pro use case for the empowered
workplace improvement in an Italian production company with an international market.
Users of the tool are workers with no IT experience at the shopfloor of the company, as
well as company managers. SURF requirements have been acquired, besides those ex-
tracted from the use case goals and objectives, by means of user stories and interviews
collected during workshops and meetings with the company real users. Moreover they
have been validated and refined through developer workshops, focus groups and user
tests. In the latter the interaction of a selection of 7 users (both workers and managers)
with the tool has been observed in doing small tasks. SURF is currently used by work-
ers at the shopfloor of this company to propose and discuss ideas and suggestions to
improve and refine the workplace.
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Process Management. Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated (2012)
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ture, implementation, and usages. Int. J. On Advances in Life Sciences 4(3), 111–124 (2012)
4. Kannengiesser, U., Müller, H.: Subject-orientation for human-centred production: A research
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