Sustainable Design and Management of Industrial Systems—A Human Factors Perspective

1. Thank you. The first paragraph of the introduction has been enriched and parsed into two paragraphs, where the first one focuses on the matter of pervasive change and how to prepare for it, and the second one presents the aim of the article.

2. Thank you. Sources have been identified for all Figures and Tables.

3. Thank you for your suggestion which we will implement in the future.

4. Thank you – all cases identified in the reviewer’s annotations have been fixed.

1.       Thank you, the abstract begins with “The aim of this concept article is to articulate multiple contributions from socio-technical fields into an approach for sustaining human-centred lifecycle management of industrial systems”.

2.         Thank you, the abstract now concludes with the statement: “Systems thinking encompassing human, organizational and technological perspectives supports integration of insights across entangled domains; this can leverage both system enhancements that promote the satisfaction of dynamic situation-dependent goals, as well as the fulfilment of objectives derived from long-term values of an organization.”

3.       Thank you, this recommendation has been followed through: “The data-driven decision-making and modelling approach has gained widespread popularity in the latest decade, coupled with a new generation of AI (artificial intelligence), based on ML (machine learning), gathering a lot of enthusiasm and promising enhanced problem solving that meets the challenges of the 21st century (with sustainability and resilience at the top of the list). Arguably, this is a recent update to the widely disseminated technology-driven approach to systems development. Coincidentally, developments in software and technology have not been commonly set against the backdrop of developments in organizational and human factors disciplines, even if it is widely recognized that management of complex systems benefits from consideration of human-centred perspectives from the design stage.” 

4.       “The research gap, within the challenges of sustainability and resilience for industrial systems and organizations in general, consists in approaches that have been missing from literature on how to accelerate leaping forward from a fragmented view of three seemingly disparate perspectives in industrial systems: technological, human and managerial. Hence, an understanding is needed on how to unify seemingly disparate recent developments on human factors and organizational design and management with the power of data-driven and technological advances, in order to leverage both system enhancements that promote the satisfaction of dynamic situation-dependent goals, as well as the fulfilment of objectives derived from long-term values of an organization.” 

5.       Thank you for this important question. “In the study at hand, an approach to unification of seemingly disparate perspectives and recent developments in human factors has been essayed, resulting in the proposition of values that may be infused pervasively into the systems’ design and management as a means of orchestration across the diverse subsystems. This unified and pervasive value proposition contributes towards fulfilment of the pressing societal challenges on industrial systems (resilient and sustainable configuration and operation), as a scalable and transferrable set of values, that can be applied at multiple scales of systems and subsystems and compatibilized with disparate generations of data-driven decision-making and modelling, as well as technological generations and managerial traditions.”    

6.       Thank you, following the description on how the research gap is overcome in the current study, implications of research for academia and practical management have been added: “A paradigmatic change is increasingly being called for, and long overdue, in order to leap forward in the ongoing race for heightened sustainability and resilience of industrial and societal systems, given the seemingly planetary desolation of climate change, resource depletion, ecological ruin and pollution. The paradigm shift entailed in the unified view of systems thinking represents a leap from the fragmented view of boxed in perspectives and academic disciplines. Even if, increasingly interdisciplinary, research that departs from the fragmented stance is inherently at odds with the unification and open systems stance that seems to be beneficial in advancing towards tackling the seemingly unsurpassable contemporary challenges using only the traditional approaches. Likewise, organizational design and management is faced with the same challenges as academia, as these are essentially planetary and civilizational, and is thirsty for new effective philosophies and principles that can come to the rescue of industrial and organizational systems at large. The current study proposes one step forward towards dissemination of the unified philosophy to complex systems design and management, by focusing on specific values and promoting the view of infusion of these values pervasively across the organization. This is to be achieved in a multi-pronged approached, which includes the classical top-down infusion by leadership, and also includes the participatory bottom-up approach, as well as the pervasive empowerment across the organization, promoting situated and proactive solutions across all agents (human, technological and organizational).”

7.       Thank you, we have added a number of additional relevant and recent references, and have included one from the Applied System innovation journal. 

8.       We have added a methodology paragraph after the paragraph stating the aim of the paper: “A conceptual framework was constructed from interdisciplinary sources on recent human factors developments. A selection of human factors literature was first done based on perceived potential impact in advancing the sustainability of industrial systems. The results extracted from the selected publications are presented in the body of the paper and cross-pollinated as a representation of the key vectors extracted from the conceptual framework.” 

9.       Thank you!

1.        Thank you very much, we appreciate your recommendations and suggestions which we have followed through in order to bring forth a more readable and impactful article.

2.        We have introduced the research gap: “The research gap this paper contributes to bridge across is situated within the challenges of sustainability and resilience for industrial systems and organizations in general. It consists in practical approaches that have been missing from literature on how to accelerate leaping forward from a fragmented view of three seemingly disparate perspectives in industrial systems: technological, human and managerial (organizational). Hence, an understanding is needed on how to unify seemingly disparate recent developments on human factors and organizational design and management with the power of data-driven and technological advances, to leverage both system enhancements that promote the satisfaction of dynamic situation-dependent goals, as well as the fulfilment of objectives derived from long-term values of an organization.”
Regarding the research question(s), a research question  has been brought forward based on the aim, and has been added following the presentation of the research gap; the research question is: “How may industrial systems’ lifecycle management be sustainably enhanced with integrated human factors and socio-technical contributions? ”

3.        Thank you, we have added a short presentation of the structure of the article at the end of the introductory chapter.
“In the following sections, this article presents the conceptual framework extracted from selected human factors literature, starting with the activity-centred perspective on development of industrial systems (section 2). Section 3 introduces a unified view connecting across traditionally siloed organizational structures, referencing a practical example from industry. Section 4 introduces the concept of situated activated dynamic change management and section 5 presents a resilience engineering perspective for value-driven organization design and operations management. The discussion (section 6) articulated the conceptual framework and integrated it into a proposition of key vectors to sustain resilience in industrial systems. The concluding section of the article also presents remaining challenges to be tackled in future research.  ”

4.        Corrected, thanks for pointing out this typo!

5.        Figure 1 is the author’s own creation, this has now been explicitly specified in the caption.

6.        Thank you for these reading suggestions. The article has now been enriched with a substantial amount of new recent and relevant references.

7.        A situated activated dynamic change management perspective – this title has now been explained in other words in the first sentence of the section: “Combining a top-down approach to steering an organization with bottom-up participatory engagement by fostering worker empowerment and trusting relationships potentially yielding decentralized decision-making, are important pre-requisites to enable change management that is not only successful but supported by the workforce and relevant to situational as well as long term challenges alike (making it dynamic and responsive).”

8.        Thank you for this recommendation, challenge accepted, paragraph included at the top of the discussion section: “Systems thinking is suited to support understanding of complex adaptive systems, where industrial systems are included. The suitability of the approach (considering entanglements, as well as open system boundaries exchanging material and communicating information with the environment), has however not yet translated into its pervasiveness. The systems thinking stance might be still looked upon by many as counter-intuitive, especially given the prevailing (and even hegemonic until recently) reductionist paradigm which has infused science and scientific disciplines for many centuries. The level of entanglements across distinct disciplines is however astounding, and it cannot be ignored when the challenges inherent in the sustainability crisis are themselves mutually dependent, necessitating a change in paradigm, akin to a Kuhnian revolution in science (Kuhn, 1970). The contribution essayed in this conceptual article is targeted towards supporting the paradigm shift that is warranted in the complex application domain of industrial systems’ engineering from the fragmented view towards unification. As daunting as the task may sound, the contribution provided herein is primarily placed within the approach demonstrated of articulating multiple contributions from distinct traditions in a tangible, actionable set of guidelines targeted at industrial systems’ design and management aiming resilience.    ”

9.        Limitations have been added in the Conclusion section (second paragraph): “The study reported in this article does not consist of a systematic literature review within any of the multiple topics covered, at the risk of having become unmanageable and unfulfillable in practice. The developments that are covered in the article are hence not exhaustive, by any means, and are to a great extent dependent on the exposure that the author has been subjected to and actively chosen, in pursuing his own scholarly progressive path and establishing a referential network and conceptual framework. This is hence an inherent limitation, which may not be unique to this conceptual article, in that the underlying selection aspects also border, to a non-negligible degree, an autobiographically dependent narrative.”
Future research directions had already been included in the conclusion section (please notice the focus on co-creation with industrial partners).
Managerial implications have been made explicit in a new paragraph at the end of the conclusion section:
“A key managerial implication of the current study complements the truism that in order to deal with change, one ought to position oneself ahead of the change; this translates in the terms of the current article as accelerating the transition form a fragmented view stance (separating subsystems into silos) towards a unified view that is inherently supporting dynamic, responsive and coordinated action. Moreover, the key vectors proposed as a result of juxtaposing the recent human-centred developments reviewed in this study, shown in the previous section (Fig. 4), when used as guidelines by top management and infused pervasively into the system’s design, management and reconfiguration lifecycle stages, provide a means of orchestration across previously siloed subsystems. It is expected that transforming the open systems stance into actionable leadership practice will enable reaping the benefits promised by the promoters of the unified view.”