The Knack of Managing

by Lewis K. Urquhart; Herbert Watson

In a word, then, the number of elements was decreased by one-third—and practically all of the elements in the new method require less time than the similar or corresponding element in the old method. The distance of travel for stock has been shortened, parts are grasped more easily, better and faster tools are provided, effort is decreased, and both hands are productively employed.

Need the imagination be stretched to the breaking point to see how a job involving the work not of one man, but of several, may be similarly organized and similarly improved?

A second illustration will serve to show the application to group work (see "Motion Study Applied to Group Work," by J. A. Piacitelli, Factory and Industrial Management, April, 1931, page 626).

The operation studied here involved cycles of approximately eleven seconds' duration, performed by a group of seven men. The material handled consisted of rolls of roofing weighing about 50 lbs. each. Many of the elements in the cycle were obviously fatiguing. The rolls had to be lifted, during transfers from one worker to another, and rolled along a horizontal runway. The trucker lifted the completed roll and placed it on his truck. While the rate of production was limited by process and speed of equipment, the chance to cut cost and fatigue prompted the study.

Examine the equipment layout before the study was made (it is shown on [page 124]), and follow the operation. A roll of roofing paper approximately 8 in. in diameter and 36 in. long was wound about the mandrel of a winding machine by one of the workers. The roll was taken off and passed to another worker who wrapped a sheet of paper about it and pasted it in place. When the roll was wrapped, he had to lift the roll, turn and deposit it on the runway. The next man inserted a bag of nails, a can of cement and an instruction sheet into the core of the roll. To do this, he was forced to turn and bend almost to floor level to get his supplies.

Next the roll was passed along to two men who, from opposite sides of the runway, placed protectors and muslin caps on the ends of the roll. It was then rolled along to another man who placed gummed paper bands about the ends and pushed the roll to the end of the runway where the trucker placed it on a truck and wheeled it into storage.

The movie camera, which is gradually finding wider industrial use in the search for the "one best" method, was used to record the work of this group. It supplied not only a photographic record of the working place and surrounding conditions, but also a simultaneous record of time and method employed by each worker regardless of speed. It was then possible to study overlapping cycles and to analyze the methods to the desired degree of accuracy—and thus to transfer parts of the cycle of one operator to that of another, thus effecting a better distribution of work and shortening the cycle of the person on whom the production of the group depends—thereby increasing the productivity of the entire group.

These analyses showed immediately an unequal distribution of work. Again, from the equipment layout made after the study, let us follow through and see what changes were effected.