If you have seen the film Schindler’s List, you will have seen the dark side of work study techniques. There is a scene where a Nazi officer
records the time of a worker. The worker makes a hinge and the stopwatch accurately tracks the time to make the product. The worker is then dragged outside to be shot (thankfully the gun doesn’t work!) because he is non-productive. Although this is a horrific extreme, we should point out that there’s no doubt work study was used as a technique in the ‘bad old days’ of the worker/manager divide, when industrial relationships in many companies were poor. Clearly, the worker/manager divide – the ‘them’ and ‘us’ syndrome – is alien and destructive to modern operations management. However, work study in itself is not responsible for creating the atmosphere in which this is likely to occur. Schonberger and Knod (1991, p. 701) state how important work study is to modern operations:
Some writers have said that the rejection of Taylorism is one reason for Japan’s industrial success. That is nonsense . . . The Japanese are the most fervent believers in industrial engineering in the world . . . In the just-in-time approach problems surface and then people apply methods study (and quality improvement) concepts to solve the problems. Time standards are widely used in Japanese industry . . . to plan how long to expect a job to take, assign the right amount of labor, and compare methods.
In Adler’s (1993) observation on the NUMMI project, he states that (p. 101):
NUMMI’s intensely Taylorist procedures appear to encourage rather than discourage organizational learning and, therefore, continuous improvement.
and concludes that:
time-and-motion discipline . . . need not lead to rigidity and alienation.
NUMMI points the way beyond Taylor-as-villain to the design of a truly learning-orientated bureaucracy.’
Work study divides into two complementary areas: method study and work measurement.
Method study Method study, in essence, is looking critically at processes in order to improve performance. The method study approach of ‘SREDIM’ can be a very practical help in modern operations management. The acronym SREDIM stands for:
Select a specific area of work or process in order to improve it
Record all relevant facts of the particular area or process
Examine all factors in the present process
Develop a better approach or process
Install the new method as a standard of excellence
Maintain this new standard as the minimum whilst actively seeking for further improvements on a continuous basis.
The five symbols used in method study can serve as a simple yet powerful approach to measuring current processes, in terms of time and other factors, in order to make improvements: The five symbols are:
O Operation Controlled storage
D Delay → Transport
Inspection
The aim is to have as much pure ‘operation’ activity as possible as this is the only activity that adds value; the others are, essentially, non-productive ‘cost’ factors and will prevent utilization of capacity.
Method study can be a powerful approach to continuous improve-ment, and can benefit key areas such as:
Department layout
Workplace layout
Materials handling
Tools design
Product design
Quality standards
Process design.
Work
measurement
In addition to method study, the other ingredient in work study is work measurement. Work measurement can have direct impact on the following areas:
Costing systems
Incentive schemes
Manpower planning
Machine utilization
Production scheduling
Capacity planning.
For example, Lincoln Electric, a leading maker of arc-welding equipment, uses work study methods as a means of determining compensation: workers are responsible for their own quality, and this approach has caused the exit of several major companies from the industry.
Ford used its own ‘Modular Arrangement of Predetermined Time Standards’ (MODAPTS) as part of their commitment to improved productivity. The success at the Norfolk, Virginia, plant resulted in similar techniques being utilized and adapted to many of its other North American plants.
Henry Ford was the first industrialist to exploit the full power of Taylor’s ideas, in assembling the Model T Ford. In conjunction with the use of the moving assembly line to pace work, Ford divided tasks between workers and set up the system so that each worker repeated a very simple task on a very frequent basis over and over again. This allowed him to employ workers with very low levels of mechanical skills, many of whom were either fresh off the farm or new immigrants to the USA, achieving unheard-of levels of productivity whilst paying workers much higher daily rates than other firms or other industries.
Today we recognize that this repetitiveness has profound physical and psychological effects on workers, including repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and problems with motivation.
Today, operations managers are responsible for managing the workforce, taking advantage of what we’ve learnt since Taylor’s and Ford’s day.
Learning curves A final aspect of the workforce that can affect capacity is the idea that workers get better at particular tasks with experience. The mathemat-ical representation of this is the learning curve. The learning curve was first identified in the manufacture of aeroplanes during World War II, where production engineers noticed that every time cumulative output doubled, the time to produce the nth aeroplane was reduced by 20 per cent. Figure 6.5 shows a theoretical example of a learning curve, where the first unit took 100 hours to complete and there is an 80 per cent learning curve. Note that because of the doubling effect the average time decrease per consecutive unit starts out as very large and then decreases very slowly. A handy technique for analysing real data is to plot observed times and cumulative numbers of units on logarithmic scales (powers of ten), where the distribution of times will approach a straight line. (If you’re not handy with logarithms, then you might want to use a learning curve table where the values have already been calculated for you.)
Timeper unit
Time
Unit 1 2 4 8
… 64
Time 100
80 64 51.2
… 26.2 Time per unit
Cumulative number of units
The concept of learning curves is thus important to capacity, because organizations can expect to achieve higher levels of output with the same amount of resources as the cumulative number of units increases.