ABSTRACT
The past 10 years have been a challenging time for the UK automotive manufacturing industry, responding to environmental directives and economic crises on a global scale. To build sustainable products and organisations there has been a focus on delivering desirable but environmentally friendly products to market faster and for less cost. Along side the human factors work developing the human machine interface of the vehicles of the future for the end customers, there has been a strengthening of the role of human factors in the design for assembly of the vehicle. Understanding user requirements is at the heart of best human factor practice.Within the field of design for assembly there are two sets of user requirements to support; those of the manufacturing engineers who deliver a new model programme to a manufacturing plant and those of the production operators. Considerable work has taken place within the automotive industry to understand the tools and methods being used to design vehicles in the virtual world in order to provide human factors guidance at this stage more effectively. There has also been a need to ensure that data on human capability is relevant and appropriately applied to today’s populations and tasks. The workshop presents research undertaken within an automotive manufacturer to develop functional anthropometric data (reach zones) and manual handling guidance that is relevant to the production environment. This research is being used to develop tools and guidance for engineers to identify production concerns very early in the programme development using virtual software when physical prototypes are not available. The workshop is an opportunity for the research methodology to be scrutinised by a peer group and also offers a forum for future research needs to be identified.
