work measurement has often been viewed adversarial process. Management attempts to measure labor costs; employees, fearing a speed up, actively interfere with the measurements. It doesn't have to be that way. It is possible to design a time study that yields valuable management data and at the same time actually increases "empowerment" may be an employee job satisfaction. The term buzzword, but in this instance it is probably the overworked most appropriate single word description of the employee benefit.
First, a little background. The primary function of a pilot plant operation in a pharmaceutical company is to create test quantities of new compounds in quantities ranging from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds. A secondary function of the operation is to demonstrate that new compounds can be produced in commercially feasible ways. Although important, establishing process feasibility function is a secondary because so few tested pharmaceuticals ever reach the production stage The mission of our department is straighforward, but it is nonetheless a very complex operation. We typically have several processes running simultaneously with each process in volving a half dozen or so steps (In chemical parlance, a step is the making or breaking of a chemical bond.) As new and different processes enter the workstream, we must constantly adjust the assignments of our operators and the scheduling of equipment.We feel that we run a very efficient operation, but we also feel that we must constantly seek ways to improve the efficiency of the operation. Without question, our limiting resource is operators are well paid, operators rather than equipment. highly skilled employees who work within a framework of what is to be done. Within that framework, it is the operators who make improvement in unit decisions. Clearly, the detailed scheduling efficiency requires a detailed examination of just what the operators do with their time. The starting point for the time study was the creation of set of activity descriptions. Anyone can create an activity list with very little effort, but a genuinely useful list requires some discussion and intuition, we created thought. Using observation, a tentative activity list that seemed to cover the work activities of the operators Two operators sampled their time for two weeks using this tentative list, and from their data we were able to create the list shown in Figure 1. Some of the activities that had seemed plausible on the tentative list were eliminated because they did not show up as a single sample during the pilot study. other activities with low numbers of samples were combined into redefined, broader activities. And, of course, activities that created problems of interpretation were redefined to avoid ambiguity.