Shop floor control systems supporting teams

The increasing number of companies that change their shop floor organization towards group and team work causes the need for new technical aids that are suitable for groups. Until today the cooperation and coordination of teams was supported by software only on office level by so called groupware. The short term scheduling seems to be a promising field of application for improved forms of decision support on shop floor level in order to increase productivity. Latest research about the tacit knowledge of workers for the task of shop floor control shows, that all members of a production team have their individual implicit knowledge. These pieces of knowledge have to be combined in order to optimize the production. A decision room with a new scheduling system is suggested to fulfill the demands mentioned above.