The following exchanges may help practitioners prepare for some basic questions:Įmployee: Is there some concern that we are not doing our work? Without a strong rationale for doing the time study, it will be hard to answer employee concerns. This is important for setting goals and for communicating to employees. Know Why the Study Is Being ConductedĪrticulate the reasons for doing a time study in writing before beginning. Follow eight simple steps in thinking through a time study to avoid potential potholes. Plan Ahead to Save Costsīecause time studies are costly in terms of both lost work time and the harnessing of employee trust and engagement, care must be taken in planning them. Over time, or by measuring the work of several people, it is possible to come to a general understanding of how long the work takes, which is good enough to get started.
The result: Time measurements are not precise, but estimates of how long a task takes. There are many opportunities for variation in conducting a task. In addition, people have different work styles – some are fast and diligent others take their time. While engaged in these input, process, output (IPO) chains, other things may intrude: mulling things over, asking a question, taking a phone call, going to lunch and so on. These processes have names, such as maintenance or transfers, and begin with inputs, move on to processes in which inputs are modified, and conclude with outputs. Work is not strictly a set of disconnected tasks, it is a process. When practitioners conduct a time study, it is essential that they know what they want to study. Without basic time study measures, it is impossible to know whether work has improved or whether there are differences in performance in a unit. Today, time and motion studies are entirely focused on the time aspect of work, or how long it takes to do a job, and are critical in getting fundamental information on how a process is working.Ī time study can establish a baseline from which to drive improvement efforts, or set a standard to control performance. Over the years, time and motion studies have been done in many industries both to ascertain how long it takes to do a given job and to improve it through setting production goals and reducing unnecessary steps in a process.
When first introduced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, time and motion studies established rules of motion that guaranteed optimal performance during a given time period and reduced the number of movements needed to get work accomplished.