Employee training and assignment for facility reconfiguration

The traditional cell formation problem has concentrated on the specification of part families and machine groups. However, the conversion of manufacturing facilities from process orientation to a cellular configuration also requires the assignment of workers to cells and the education of these workers to operate as a self-directed cellular team. In addition to training in scheduling, quality and other support tasks, cross-training of workers on heterogeneous processing equipment may be required. In this paper, we provide and compare two integer programming models for guiding the assignment of workers to cells and the selection of a training program for each employee. Solution procedures are tested on sample problems of varying size to demonstrate the computational time required and the usefulness of the output solution. The structure of the models and test results are used to develop rules to support the decision making for worker assignment and training program selection.