Time Study

The first step is to ask the workers to record time and description of every task they are doing, regardless how small, for 1 complete production cycle (time period). You must ensure there is no repercussions for honesty. You may want to keep the names off the task sheet and number them. Tell them that it is only to find duplication of work or inefficiencies and keep them involved with finding solutions.

Next you will have to compile and analyze the tasks.(compare with job description)

Then when any problems have been identified, Have a brainstorming session with the workers to find solutions.

Implement any solutions that have consensus.

In my experience the numbers will be extremely surprising. We have found that the most experienced/ skillful trades spend as little as 5% of their time doing the job they were hired for. They spend allot of their time either helping someone else, or doing secondary jobs.

Some solutions may be extra training, or dedicating a certain task to a specialist. etc

If you don't keep the workers involved with the whole procedure, (transparency) you will have allot of resistance to the possibility of change.

List the process paths.

For each process path, identify each step.

Determine the theoretical time to complete each step.

Determine Waiting between and at each step.

Determine moves between each step,

Determine actual time to complete each step.

Determine time material sits in inventory.

All time in excess of the sum of the theoreticall times to complete each step is waste. (Including Waiting and transportation (im a purist))

Get cracking!

PS rather than tackle everything at once, go to your biggest bottleneck in your operation, then do the time study on processes that supply it.

By the way counting the steps or distance that parts move in the operation and drawing them on a pplan of your shop is faster than doing a time study, its called a spaghetti diagram. Go after the long complicated ones first, at a dime a step, you can get to a dollar in ten steps, how far do they have to walk to get a new tool?

Google spaghetti diagram and have at it.

milo been there, done that, would you like my t-shirt?

Jack, You make many good points.

May I add a Thought or towo?

"You can be sure there is extensive T&M in the mass production plants. The reason is very simple. The competitive economic system, with every manufacturer producing what he hopes to sell, the more the merrier and the richer, results in a rush to the bottom on price and hence quality."

I counsel my clients/ employers/ Cutomers that we do not sell products, and that the sales price is divorced from ourt costs. In nearly all cases, including the Rolex that you point out, The MArket enforces the price. Just check your spam box to see what the market charges for "not quite rolexes" while those who want the real thing pay Much much more.

WHat we sell , is in fact , the time on our machines. The products whether bolts, fuel injectors, or rolex watches are just the medium of exchange, the wampum, if you will, that creates a "billable event." It can be argued that we are actually selling our process knowledge to make that "wampum," but we can't bill for knowledge, inevitably we charge for time...

So minimizing the most expensive input that we control (time) is rational, and not a headlong chase to lower quality.

second point: " It also historically has resulted in the loss of the craftsman skills of those who made the entire watch, machine, etc., because modern production methodologies alienate the producer from what is produced."

Interesting ly, I was in Chamonix in France visiting some shops there as a side trip to my participation in SIMODEC. One shop that I visited (very technologically advanced and savvy in more than just machining processes- plastics, metal casting metal injection molding, assembly, etc.) told me that they had just lost 10 of their best machinists to none other than Rolex. So much for the Top of the food chain being the reservoir of skilled craftsmen... they were out trying to get them wherever they could.

It is an interesting aside to your comments.

The idea of quality versus quantity in the watch situation that you give actually seems to be an attempt at equivalency; one very expensive Rolex watch provides satisfaction S for one person at $XXXXX. Thousands of cheaper but adequate watches provide satisfaction S functionality for YYYYY people at $XX. I am going to give this Price = quality Where Quality is dollarized satisfaction idea alot more thought before I attempt to write about it.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

milo

Milo,

You can call it whatever you want. The truth is in the actual economics of the system.

Although it is machines that are used in production, the machines came into existence as the result of there being a market for the products they produce.

Although, in order to offset the inevitable result of time and motion you may employ deceptive language, the truth is that the owner of those machines bought them to produce product, i.e., whichever gidget or gadget he thinks he can produce at a profit.

He may politely listen to your obscurantist language but you can be sure in his mind he is thinking "Yeah. Right! Stop bullshitting me and tell me how I can get more product out of my worker's work day."

I had not intended to go here but now I think it appropriate.

The question is where does value, either of machine time, and there are shops set up to provide just the commodity of machine time to one or another manufacturer, come from?

Consider! Does an apple hanging on a tree have any value? Does ore or oil in the ground have any value? Until the apple is picked for its use value, eating, it has no value. The same is true of ore or oil in the ground.

It is human labor that produces value through the conversion of his/her ability to work and transform natural things; pull the apple off the tree, and thereby convert it to serve human purpose and need.

I would submit, that hiring of human ability to labor, is part of that process.

We are all familiar with the expression in industry "A fair day's labor for a fair day's pay."

These days a fair day's labor is considered, at least here in the states, as eight hours. A fair day's pay is whatever the standard for those eight hours doing the employers bidding. On the surface that looks like a fair exchange. Work for the employer for eight hours and he will give you a fair day's pay, on average just enough to come back and do it again on the morrow.

Truth be to tell, the historical process and custom, hide the fact that human beings are capable in a day's work of producing far more value than they need to exist until the next day. If you study aboriginal peoples, at least under average natural conditions, you discover that they have a lot of leisure time having satisfied their need for today in only a small portion of that day.

That means that the production environment of the factory, assuming it competently managed, requires only a part of the work day to produce the value the worker needs to exchange for housing, food, clothing, etc. The commodity produced in excess of those needs, is to the worker, surplus value; value surplus to his needs.

That is where the employer makes his profit. That is his whole intent and purpose of assembling an industrial plant, employment of workers in order to involve them in a production process that puts a portion of production in his hands to do with as he pleases.

You can disguise that economic reality and relationship any way you wish. You can call it, as you do, by a portion of the process, i.e., machine time. But then you would have to explain how it is that the employers, all without fail, prevent the workers from walking off with the product of the machine time and their labor on those machines. After all that is his profit from working the machines and humans for the day.

I will leave the morals of that to you and our readers.

As to the watches you make my point. In a factory where mass production is not the rule, the most critical element is the skilled productive staff. Darn right those owners will get such workers wherever and whenever they can. In terms of production in such a factory, those workers are worth far more then prosaic, common, everyday, machinery.

And to the skilled worker able to meet the high standards, those jobs, at Rollex, are worth far more than being constantly pressed to make more valuable the time of the machines in a mass production environment, no matter what terms you may use trying to sell your T&M skills and knowledge to those employers.

In short, the production process in general, is about production of commodities, i.e., sale of commodities whose value is surplus to the workers needs but the whole object of the production process, in an economic environment where sale of those commodities, in competition, is the be all and end all.

There are exceptions, but I have just laid out the general rule.

Just watch as the ability to sell those commodities comes to an abrupt end.

Incidentally, don't read this as a personal attack. I have just laid out the objective facts of modern industry.

j.

We are closer than you may think.

I just don't see the Labor as the biggest factor.

Marx's labor theory of value drove me off. One can have one's workers pat mud cakes all day, at he end of the day, they are still just mudcakes.

Apples on the tree do have value, intrinsic value which can be collateralized. The labor merely converts that value from potential to actualized. Hungry people would aspire to have that apple; just as they aspire to have that Rolex. The market demand eventually is recognized by someone smart enough to harvest and sell the apples.

It is our machines/ processes,. that take the humans time and allow them to create more and better. conistently. To statistically controlled levels.

I regret that my reframing of the issue came across as obscurantist, but frankly, people always fixate on outputs and seldom examine the map of the process of getting them.

Something that apparently neither you nor i suffer from.

Milo

Milo,

You can always talk about collateralizing apples on a tree. No doubt we can find bare land, no trees no apples, standing as collateral.

Indeed, use another word with essentially the same meaning, securitization, as in securitization of bundles of mortgages, which are really commitments, as is any loan, of future labor power and what do we have? Those securitised bundles of mortgages, i.e., claims on land and things built on land, are now said to be at the root of this economic system coming apart big time.

It is no accident that I started at the beginning; with labor and the apple hanging on a tree. Try collateralizing apples when there are lots of apple trees and they all exist, as in our aboriginal beginnings in Africa, and they belong to no one or everyone since agriculture had not yet been invented nor private ownership of surplus which only arises in the middle period of agriculture when it first becomes possible to produce, collectively, surpluses, and a special task of protecting the surplus also develops and we begin the thousands of years long process of social differentiation based on the relationships to that surplus and the means of producing it.

But, at the base of that, forget Marx, we don't need him to understand the truth of these relationships although he was the first, after twenty or so years in the British Library, to unravel the process of the economic system that began right there in the City of London, at the base of that, at the base of all value, is labor.

Everything else is the language developed, consciously or not, alongside that economic process to conceal and hide the truth of matters, that all human existence is based on human labor and especially the fact that only homo sap is capable of producing in a given period more than enough, i.e., surplus, to their needs for said same period.

Employ labor power to pat mud all day and you will soon employ no one. Employ labor power to produce marketable commodities and pay less than the full value of those commodities to labor, and you have become a business man whose whole purpose from then on is to drive labor to produce more while still paying only enough for labor to come back and do it all again tomorrow, this to multiply over and over the same process, alongside your mates in competition until your product, your commodity, is so plentiful that it cannot be sold and you have what is being faced today.

You may blame cheap credit (Anticipating you) for that, but the object in cheap credit was to encourage more creation of factories and production, when already the market was waining and slumping because of overproduction for the markets possibilities.

To cap it off, money is also a commodity. Cheap credit meant more money to loan at cheap rates and when good credit candidates had been exhausted the sellers of money began giving loans to bad credit, without any proof of ability to pay, which is now the trigger but certainly not the only cause, not the base, of this economic crisis.

The truth of the matter is not as you put it "It is our machines/ processes,. that take the humans time and allow them to create more and better. consistently. To statistically controlled levels."

The fact is that competition and individual seeking to get rich, ensure a process that is not at all controlled.

Witness, the seven year business cycle, and the sixty or seventy year major depressions, not simply my assertion but easily demonstrated from history which of course is what Marx did, along with Engels, and being soft gentlefolk, academicians who first met as young Hegelians while at university, who cringed at the condition of labor, set off on their long historic, unfinished, quest.

Again, one does not have to be a Marxist to see this. In Marx' time perhaps, but today with all the information and data available, not at all.

Doing what you do for a living, i.e., selling your particular skills like all the rest of us, does not mean you have to hide from the bare truth behind all sorts of abstruse, but untrue, formulations which do not match up to the material actuality of history, any more than does the idea of cheaply splitting water lead to near free energy as our modern alchemists would have us believe.

Physics and chemistry have their laws and so does, as any materialist or scientist must assert, social reality and the economics from which it rises.

j.

Good evening, Jack.

In your first post to me you asked "Consider! Does an apple hanging on a tree have any value? Does ore or oil in the ground have any value? Until the apple is picked for its use value, eating, it has no value. The same is true of ore or oil in the ground."

I Did consider, and responded with my refutation, that the apple does in fact have a value of itself, and that that value is evidenced by its being able to be used as collateral.(The collateralization is evidence of someone recognizing its value.)

Now, you are condemning my careful response, to your challeng question, by making this standard commercial transaction, a logical depiction of your choice of example, now somehow the moral equivalent to the atrocities currently playing out in the subprime market.

This level of argumentation by defaming/claiming supposed moral equivalency goes too far afield from the original question to serve much purpose.

My reframes of the system of production do not resonate with you. That is fine. We can agree to disagree. They continue to serve me, my clients, employers etc. very well. I am hopeful that my counsel on how to look at a process for improvement will help the original poster to be effective in his efforts.

I am just tryng to help someone who had the courage to ask for an assist, to get a good productive start on process improvement.

Not Looking for an argument.

Peace.

Milo

Milo,

Not a moral comparison at all. I thought I had tried really hard not to turn a discussion of the simple mechanics of market process into a moral war.

What I did was compare your prospective collateralization of an apple still hanging on a tree to the collateralization, or more specifically securitization, of prospective labor in the future not yet worked.

The apple until it is picked may only have the prospective value, if it can be sold, it would have after being picked only if some fool bought the contract.

I compared that to the securitization of mortgages of properties whose values were highly inflated because the government was printing money not backed by performed labor, rather value based on labor maybe in the future.

It is precisely the commodification of money that provides for the exponential explosive expansion of the productive system, no matter that the growth of market is at best a steady linear expansion, that gives rise to these crises.

Nothing of morality there nor any insult intended. But your response suggests you may recognize the immorality of printing money that is not congealed labor in that it is based on hopes that an economy, notorious for hundreds of years for its periods of crisis, may yet employ labor under conditions sufficient to extract some of the actual value money ostensibly represents.

Remember, money is simply a marker for equating the labor entailed in wheat or a bolt of linen, rather than all the time cutting linen or weighing wheat in a barter system.

Again! No insult intended but your post just evoked my automatic response to matters always not far from the front of my mind.

j.

As I said, we are probably closer than it seems. I see very little difference between my statement:"WHat we sell , is in fact , the time on our machines. The products whether bolts, fuel injectors, or rolex watches are just the medium of exchange, the wampum, if you will, that creates a "billable event." "

And your latest"Remember, money is simply a marker for equating the labor entailed in wheat or a bolt of linen, rather than all the time cutting linen or weighing wheat in a barter system."

You say labor, I say time on our machines.

however, the fallacy of equating moral equivalence is a standard argumentation ploy. And recognizing it, I Call it so and state No contest. Peace, I'm off to a technical conference for 4 days.

milo

Two things to keep in mind when measuring the time to do each step:

1.) Sight of a man with a stopwatch and clipboard will slow the average worker 30%, giving generous times for each step.

2) Once you assign a piecework quota, many workers will work hard to meet it in 6 hr, then slack off the remaining 2 hr. One place I worked, it was not unusual to see workers in the factory sleeping from 2:30 on.

If you can get the employees to buy in to the project, you will have a chance that the company will benefit from it. Without support, it will be a "Feelgood" project.

I have a suggestion for the workers in the plant to help you. Get a rope, tar and feathers.

j.