Dean,
My first thought relates to your statement: "I was under the impression that manufacturing engineering was responsible..." We find any statement that begins similar to this to be indicative of other issues within an organization. Unless it's your responsibility to assign job tasks within the organization, than this statement is counter-productive to the concept of working together to accomplish a task.
My second thought relates to the statement: "Somehow, I feel this is putting the mice in charge of the cheese..." We find this statement to also be detrimental to the team concept, and the CI program that you have described. Involving team memebers in these decisions, we believe, is essential to continuously improving production processes. ME's don't sit there and work on the product all day, and the knowledge gained from the assemblers that actually do the work is invaluable to improving the process while also making it more efficient.
All of that said, the answer to your question of "Who designs work cells?" can only be...whomever has been designated by management to do so. If management has decided that Mfg. Eng. should do it, then they should. If management has decided that the direct labor folks should do it, they should do it.
My personal opinion is that manufacturing engineering should be tasked with the responsibility of desiging the work cells, and that they should utilize the direct labor resources who work with the product all day to determine the best methodology. Working together not only fosters better relations between direct and indirect labor resources, it also leads to a more efficient and accurate process when all sides work on it collaboratively.
Incidentally, I'm an electronics job-shop manager, not a lean guru. I expect, however, that any ops manager, lean implementation officer, or even production manager would answer the same way.
cheers ..rob
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