This paper presents a case study conducted to understand the change management process for a large-scale automation implementation into an existing manufacturing environment producing highly complex, low volume products.  Through a series of fifteen semi-structured interviews of eight engineers from three functional backgrounds, a process model was created to understand how the company of study introduced a new automation system into their existing production line, while also noting obstacles identified in the process.  This process model illustrates the duration, sequencing, teaming, and complexity of the project.  This model is compared to other change processes found in literature to understand critical elements found within change management.  A key characteristic found in all methods is that change management processes are highly human-centric.  Therefore, a collaborative resistance model is applied to the process model to identify and estimate the resistance for each task in the process.  Based on the objective analysis of the collaborative situations extracted from the interviews, the areas of highest resistance were predicted.  By comparing the resistance model predictions to the interview data results, it is shown that the resistance model is able to identify the challenges found in interviews.  This suggests that the resistance model can identify obstacles within the process and opens the opportunity to mitigate those challenges before they are encountered within the process.  Finally, the process that was revealed in the case study appeared to contain some elements of a design process as compared to traditional change management processes found in literature.  This leads to a new research question about what are the fundamental differences between a change management process and an engineering design process that may be explored in future work.


Alignment of a Collaborative Resistance Model With a Change Management Process in Industry: A Case Study on Production Automation

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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