Towards Human-Centered Best Practice Sharing in Global Production Networks for More Socially Sustainable Production Processes.

Due to globally distributed and interconnected value chains, manufacturing companies operate across multiple production sites in complex production networks. An effective transfer of knowledge within the network can create decisive competitive advantages. However, this learning process is often impeded by a lack of knowledge transparency in the network. The Best Practice Sharing (BPS) tool is a data-driven approach to facilitate knowledge sharing by identifying comparable processes across production sites and determining optimization potential through process evaluation. However, the current version of the BPS tool focuses solely on economic criteria for process optimization. To also consider social sustainability aspects, a human-centered perspective on process design is needed. To this end, this paper introduces two extensions to the BPS approach. First, based on a systematic literature review, a framework for characterizing the human role in production processes is developed, which extends the identification of comparable processes. Second, a risk assessment-based analysis approach for the evaluation of processes following human-centered criteria is presented. Here, particular emphasis is placed on identifying suitable methods to assess psychosocial risk factors, using a second systematic literature review. Together, these two extensions pave the way for human-centered BPS in global production networks.