The use of kitting to ease assemblers' cognitive workload

The higher level of product variation in the automotive industry leads to an increasing workload for the assembler that has to search, fetch and assemble all the variants. This puts high demands on the information that is given to the assembler to fulfil the assembly task. This paper describes the impact of information overload and sources, and their influence on the assembler. Through observations conducted in the Swedish automotive industry, the study has shown that the assembly personnel perceive the kit as structured information and that structured kits are able to present distinct information at a certain place to the assembler, which in turn reduces the searching, resulting in decreased cognitive workload.