Creating Industrially Relevant Environments for Teaching Lean Manufacturing at Karlstad University

Simulation for training lean manufacturing ranges from simple paper-based or LEGO (R)-based games to larger scale simulation environments, for instance push car assembly. Whilst such simulations may be suitable for educating students, they are often less suitable for training industry workers. The latter group is more diverse and is more used to intuitive learning than to formal instruction. Thus, it is important that the training environment for this group more realistically represents the work environment; otherwise training transfer will be limited. For this reason, a lean training environment that includes materials processing stations as well as assembly areas was created. The stations exhibit some realistic behaviour such as stochastic breakdowns.