“It should take how long!” - workstudy

07/06/2009 by Geoff.

Some of us are old enough to remember the time and motion man with his stop watch who operated in the work study department. Rather surprisingly we recently had a client ask about WS which caused us to dredge the depths of our memories.

We’ve operated in these environments and on the plus side WS information provides valuable information for estimates but unfortunately was to often used for the basis of a time based incentive scheme. Since the employee spent most of his time doing a task they soon found a way to do things more quickly, milk what was supposed to be an incentive and hence the incentive scheme fell into disrepute. By the way we tend to view incentives as making up for poor management! But the right ones do have a place in successful companies.

In more recent times what we can sell thankfully comes into the picture. As a result we tend to talk about the output of cells, flexibility of people and the throughput of a unit. Having said this we still have to do estimates and have a view of what resource we need to fulfill orders (on time in full) - in this respect WS techniques are not dead.

How many of you check actual times against estmates? 

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