Article Critique

The Future Shop-Floor Operators, Demands, Requirements, and Interpretations

By
Magnus Holm
Critiqued by
Parth Hemant Purandare
Roll: 15BE02064
3rd Year Mechanical Engineering
__________________________________________________________________

Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to critique the article ‘The future shop-floor operators, demands,
requirements, and interpretations' written by Magnus Holm. This paper first summarises the
article. Secondly it briefly critiques the article. Thirdly is the conclusion of the critique.

Summary of the Article

The article describes the evolution of the shop-floor technologies in Sweden. The author has
interviewed managers from different companies to know their expectations from their employees
on the shop-floor. The author has presented them before the future shop-floor operators and tried
to know their level of understanding and awareness of the current scenario. The findings of study
suggest that there is a vast gap between the industry and the academics and that much has to be
done to keep the Swedish manufacturing sector at par with the global scenario.

Article Critique
The author has tried to get a sense of the current scenario of shop-floor technologies prevalent in
Sweden and the future scope of advancement in the Swedish manufacturing sector. For this, the
author has interviewed managers and HR specialists from six different companies of Sweden, as
well as more than 200 technical high school students constituting the future shop-floor operators.
This collection, I feel, is too small to be able to extrapolate to the entire global manufacturing
sector. There are more than 2500 manufacturing companies having operations in Sweden across
more than 20 different sectors that employ more than 6,00,000 operators. Even greater number of
technical high school students is released into the shop-floor operations market every year.
Hence, the survey done by the author doesn’t really represent the entire manufacturing sector of
Sweden, leave alone the global scenario. In spite of this, the findings of the survey are
astonishing. Majority of the students interviewed are ignorant of the current trends in the
manufacturing technology and have no clear idea about what their potential employers expect.
More than 40% of the surveyed students have no clear idea as to what the terms like ‘Holistic
understanding’, ‘Innovation’, and ‘IT-knowledge’ mean. This shows that there is a vast gap
between the employers’ expectations, and, the skills and know-how of the future shop-floor
operators. Also, the reach of information technology to the shop-floor is very limited in Sweden
as compared to the rest of the world. The author has cited the example of smart phones being just
limited to personal use and the near-to-nil use of advanced technologies such as Augmented
Reality and computer-aided decision making systems in shop-floor manufacturing and
management.

Thus, much needs to be done in order to keep the Swedish manufacturing sector abreast with the
global trends and techniques. It is very important to have continuous interaction between school
and industry. The companies must keep the students informed about the latest trends and
advancements in shop-floor technologies and find out a way to train them accordingly. In the age
of industry 4.0, it is imperative for the students to have at least a basic understanding of
automation and computer-aided decision making and management.

Conclusion
This paper presents both the summary and the critique of the article. The content, merits and
lacunae of the article were analysed and critiqued. In conclusion, I would like to say that the
author should have covered a broader set of respondents and interviewees to analyse the
demands and requirements in their true sense. The current article might only be of some use to
the six sectors analysed. The author is terribly wrong in trying to generalise this extremely small
data for the entire manufacturing sector of Sweden, never mind the entire world.

** Name of the pdf of this article uploaded in classroom is “Opportunistic maintenance of

production systems subject to random wait time and multiple control limits”