ABSTRACT
Human factors professionals in manufacturing have mainly focused on two areas: design of industrial workstations and design of products to meet customer’s needs and improve functionality and usability. The design of products has broader implications. It affects the types of jobs created in the assembly of the product and in the maintenance of the product. Products that are well designed will be easy to assemble. The manufacturing tasks may be distributed in an optimal fashion between manual labor and automated processes. The allocation of tasks to people or machines should be beneficial for the company, and should also create satisfying jobs for the employees. In the first part of this chapter we will address design for manufacturability. In the second part of the chapter, we will analyze how products should be designed in order simplify maintainability: design for maintenance.
