An Analysis Method Considering Manufacturing Skills and Technologies Toward Slow Manufacturing

Continuous productivity improvement is an essential target in the manufacturing industry, and two key approaches to improving labor productivity are reducing costs and increasing value added. This study focuses on increasing value added by improving labor productivity, specifically through craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is based on slow manufacturing and contributes to the well-being of workers and sustainability. The study proposes a method for analyzing the pattern of importance of customer requirements by considering a combination of manufacturing skills and automation technologies. The method consists of three steps: introducing the Skill–Technology Index, making a quality function deployment matrix, and calculating and analyzing the importance pattern of customer requirements. The proposed method was applied to a glass manufacturer, and the calculated result was not significantly different from the pattern of the current importance of customer requirements set by the company. In future work, the proposed method will be improved to find the appropriate balance of craftsmanship and automation technology.