Production management teams often face unfamiliar situations where each team member must understand new phenomena individually before the team can make mutually understandable and acceptable decisions. Contradicting subjective judgments can distort the group’s decision-making process because team members understand situations differently and are generally prone to behavioural biases. This paper presents the development of a sensemaking support system (S³,S cube) for selecting improvement projects in a complex,small-volume batch production system of a premium car manufacturer. All phases of the sensemaking process are facilitated by making various sources of information available to a team of managers and experts to reduce conflicts regarding the selection of improvement projects. S³ is based on a lens model which combines judgments of the management team with discrete event simulation and provides visual representations of the differences and misjudgements related to various improvement options. The results–that can easily be generalised to many similar settings–indicate different understanding and lack of coherence within the management team which prevents them from defining mutually acceptable actions. This is countered with the creation of an action proposal,summarising and visualising causal relationships,and connecting them to improvement options to improve performance of the production system.

Purpose: Recent years have seen a technological change, Industry 4.0, in the manufacturing industry. Human–robot cooperation, a new application, is increasing and facilitating collaboration without fences, cages or any kind of separation. The purpose of the paper is to review mainstream academic publications to evaluate the current status of human–robot cooperation and identify potential areas of further research. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review is offered that searches, appraises, synthetizes and analyses relevant works. Findings: The authors report the prevailing status of human–robot collaboration, human factors, complexity/ programming, safety, collision avoidance, instructing the robot system and other aspects of human–robot collaboration. Practical implications: This paper identifies new directions and potential research in practice of human–robot collaboration, such as measuring the degree of collaboration, integrating human–robot cooperation into teamwork theories, effective functional relocation of the robot and product design for human robot collaboration. Originality/value: This paper will be useful for three cohorts of readers, namely, the manufacturers who require a baseline for development and deployment of robots; users of robots-seeking manufacturing advantage and researchers looking for new directions for further exploration of human–machine collaboration.

This study reviews prevailing trends in “for-profit” business-related gamification. It examines the current literature, focusing on gamification elements, industries and variables that is of interest to researchers in different business environments. A systematic mapping approach was applied to this study. Articles were selected from different databases in a two-step screening process, subject to sets of inclusion and exclusion criteria. A total of 25 articles were further for: (1) represented industries, (2) orientation of the gamified system, (3) types of implementation, (4) gamification elements analysed, (5) impact on companies, and (6) company variables analysed. Results confirmed that the number of empirical studies on gamification in for-profit organisations is growing. Researchers have placed greater emphasis on analysing customer-related gamification environments than on employee-oriented gamification. This finding is consistent with the prevailing trend of increasing demand from practitioners to gamify customer-related processes. This is likely due to the potential for higher positive impact on the performance of companies. Most frequently deployed gamification elements are badges, rewards, and leader boards. The literature suggests that over all, gamification has a positive effect on various company variables, such as motivation, engagement of employees, brand loyalty, and customer experience. This paper highlights the particular areas of business-related gamification that have already been examined and possible future directions.