Application software for supporting labour management in large‑scale plant production systems: a conceptual design

In large-scale plant production systems (e.g., fields, greenhouses, and plant factories), appropriate labour management is required for success. However, labour management, especially labour assignment to tasks, is time-consuming and cumbersome for the manager of a large-scale plant production system. For reducing the manager's workload as well as for optimising the utilisation of human resources, a new conceptual farm management information system (FMIS) is proposed. For the newly developed FMIS focused on labour management, we have identified five core functions: 1) long-term planning, 2) medium-term planning, 3) short-term planning, 4) tallying the labourers' shift requests, and 5) collecting work records. First, using the long-term planning function, an approximate (weekly) work schedule is created. Next, a more precise (daily) work plan is produced with the medium-term planning function. Simultaneously, labourers' requests for shifts are collected by the tallying function. Based on the medium-term plan and labourers' shift requests, the short-term planning function is used to assign labourers to their respective tasks and locations. At the same time, the sufficiency rate of specific tasks is estimated from the individually obtained working speeds, to optimise human resource utilisation. Here, the working speed is collected and updated using the work record collection function. In this paper, a conceptual design of application software for labour management in large-scale plant production systems is presented and discussed.