Job Design and Work Measurements.

The operations manager’s job, by definition, deals with managing the personnel that
create a firms products and services. To say that this is a challenging job in today’s
complex environment is an understatement. The diversity of the workforce is cultural and
educational background, coupled with frequent organization restructuring, calls for a
much higher level of people management skills than has been required in even the recent
past.

Objectives in managing people.

1. The objective in managing personnel is to obtain the highest productivity possible

with-out sacrificing quality, service, or responsiveness.
2. The operations manager uses job design techniques to structure the work so that it
will meet both the physical and behavioral needs of the human worker.
3. Work measurement methods are used to determine the most efficient means of
performing a given task, as well as to set reasonable standards for performing it.
4. People are motivated by many things, only one of which is financial reward.
5. Operations managers can structure such rewards not only to motivate consistently
high performance but also to re-in force the most important aspects of the job.

Job design Decisions

Job design may be defined as the function of specifying the work activities of an
individual or group in an organizational setting. Its objective is to develop job structures
that meet the requirements of the organization and its technology and that satisfy the job
holder’s personal and individual requirements.
Who : Mental and physical characteristics of the work force
What : Task(s) to be performed
Where : Geographic locale of organization; location of work areas
When : Time of day; time of occurrence in the work flow
Why : Organizational rationale for the job; objectives and motivation of the worker
How : Method of performance and motivation ultimate job structure

These decisions are affected by the following trends:

1. Quality control as part of the worker’s job.
2. Cross-training workers to perform multi skilled jobs.
3. Employee involvement and team approaches to designing and organizing work.
4. Informing ordinary workers through e-mail and the Internet, thereby expanding
the nature of their work and their ability to do it.
5. Extensive use of temporary workers.
6. Automation of heavy manual work.
 7. Most important of all, organizational commitment to providing meaningful and
rewarding jobs for all employees.

BEHAVIOURAL CONSDERATIONS:

Specialization of Labour
Specialization of labor is the two-edged sword of job design. On one hand, specialization
has made possible high-speed, low-cost production, and from a materialistic standpoint, it
has greatly enhanced our standard of living. On the other hand, extreme specialization
has serious adverse effects on workers, which in turn are passed onto management. In
essence, the problem is to determine how much

Sr Advantages to management Advantages to labour

no
1 Rapid training of the workers Little or no education is required t
obtain work
2 Ease in recruiting new workers Ease in learning the job
3 High output due to simple and repititve
work
4 Low wages due to ease of
substitutability of labour
5 Close control over work and work loads

Sr Disadvantages to management Disadvantages to labour

no
1 Difficulty in controlling quality because
no one has responsibility for entire
product
2 Worker dissatisfaction leading to hidden
cost arising from turnover, absenteeism,
tardiness, grievances and intentional
disrupton of production process
3 Reduced likelihood of improving the
process because of workers limited
perspective
4 Limited flexibility to change the
production process to produce new or
improved products
Boredom stemming from repetitive
nature of work
Little gratification from work itself
because of a small contribution to each
item
Little or no control over the work pace,
leading to frustration and fatigue ( is
assembly line situations)
Little opportunity to progress to a better
job because significant learning is
rarely possible on a fractioned work

Job Enrichment
Job enlargement generally entails adjusting a specialized job to make it more interesting
to the job holder. A job is said to be enlarged horizontally if the worker performs a
greater number or variety of tasks, and it is said to be enlarged vertically if the worker is
involved in planning, organizing, and inspecting his or her own work. Horizontal job
enlargement is intended to counter act over simplication and to permit the worker to
perform a whole unit of work.
Vertical enlargement (traditionally termed job enrichment) attempts to broaden workers
influence in the transformation process by giving them certain managerial powers over
their own activities.
The organizational benefits of job enrichment occur in both quality and productivity.
Quality in particular improves dramatically because when individuals are responsible for
their work output, they take ownership of it and simply do a better job. Also, because
they have a broader understanding of the work process, they are more likely to catch
errors and make corrections than if the job is narrowly focused. Productivity
improvements also occur from job enrichment, but they are not as predictable or as large
as the improvements in quality.

Socio technical systems

This approach attempts to develop jobs that adjust the needs of the production process
technology to the needs of the worker and work group.
The socio technical approach has been applied in many countries often under the heading
of
Autonomous work groups,
Japanese-style work groups, or
Employee involvement (EI) teams.

The benefits of teams are similar to those of individual job enrichment: They provide
higher quality and greater productivity (they often set higher production goals than
general management), do their own support work and equipment maintenance, and have
increased chances to make meaningful improvements.

Modified Job Design Principles

One major conclusion from these applications is that the individual or work group
requires a logically integrated pattern of work activities that incorporates the following
job design principles:
Task variety.
An attempt must be made to provide an optimal variety of tasks within each job. Too
much variety can be inefficient for training and frustrating for the employee. Too little an
lead to boredom and fatigue.
The optimal level is one that allows the employee to rest from a high level of attention or
effort while working on another task or, conversely, to stretch after periods of routine
activity.

Skill variety.
Research suggests that employees derive satisfaction from using a number of skill levels.
Feedback.
There should be some means for informing employees quickly when they have achieved
their targets. Fast feedback aids the learning process.

Task identity.
Sets of tasks should be separated from other sets of tasks by some clear boundary.
Whenever possible, a group or individual employee should have responsibility for a set of
tasks that is clearly defined, visible, and meaningful. In this way, work is seen as
important by the group or individual undertaking it, and others understand and respect its
significance.

Task autonomy.
Employees should be able to exercise some control over their work. Areas of discretion
and decision making should be available to them.

PHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Work Physiology
One approach to incorporating the physical costs of moderate to heavy work in job design
is work physiology.
Pioneered by Eastman Kodak in the 1960s, work physiology sets work rest cycles
according to the energy expended in various parts of the job. For example, if a job entails
caloric expenditure above five calories per minute, the required rest period must equal or
exceed the time spent working. Obviously, the harder the work, the more frequent and
longer the rest periods.

Ergonomics is the term used to describe the study of the physical arrangement of the
work space together with the tools used to perform a task. In applying ergonomics, we
strive to fit the work to the body rather than forcing the body to conform to the work.

Work methods

Responsibility for developing work methods in large firms is typically assigned either to
a staff department designated methods analysis or to an industrial engineering
department. In small firms, this activity is often performed by consulting firms that
specialize in work methods design.
The principal approach to the study of work methods is the construction of charts, such as
operations charts, worker machine charts, simo (simultaneous motion) charts, and activity
charts, in conjunction with time study or standard time data. The choice of which charting
method to use depends on the tasks activity level that is, whether the focus is on
(1) production process,
(2) the worker at a fixed workplace,
(3) a worker interacting with equipment, or
(4) a worker interacting with other workers
Process chart
The objective in studying a production process is to identify delays, transport distances,
processes, and processing time requirements to simplify the entire operation.

Operation: Something is actually being done (O)

Transportation: The subject of the study (product, service, or person) moves from one
location to another.( → )
Inspection: The subject is observed for quality and correctness.( □ )
Delay: The subject of the study must wait before starting the next step in the process.( ⌂ )
Storage: The subject is stored, such as finished products in inventory or completed
papers in a file.( ▼ )

Work Measurements and standards

The fundamental purpose of work measurement is to set time standards for a job. Such
standards are necessary for four reasons:
1 To schedule work and allocate capacity.
2 To provide an objective basis for motivating the work force and measuring workers
performance.
3 To bid for new contracts and to evaluate performance on existing ones.
4 To provide benchmarks for improvement.

Facility Layout

The format of arrangements of departments in a facility are defined by the general pattern
of work flow; there are three basic types ( process layout, product layout, and fixed
position layout) and one hybrid type(group technology or cellular layout).

Process layout
This layout is also called a job shop or functional layout.
This layout is a format in which similar equipments or functions are grouped together,
such as all lathes in one area and all stamping machines in another.
A part being worked on then travels, according to the established sequence of operations,
from one area to area, where the proper machines are located for each operation
This type of layout is typical of hospitals where areas are dedicated to particular types of
medical care, such as maternity wards and intensive care units.

Product layout
This layout is also called a flow shop layout.
This layout is the one in which equipment or work processes are arranged according to
the progressive steps by which the product is made.
The path for each part is, in effect, a straight line.
Production lines for shoes, chemical plants and car wshes are all product layout.

Group technology layout or cellular layout

This layout groups dissimilar machines into work centers or cells into work on products
that have similar shapes and processing requirements
GT layout is similar to process layout (cells are designed to perform a particular set of
processes and it is similar to product layout (cells are dedicated o a limited range of
products)

Fixed position layout

In a fixed position layout, the product remains at one location.
Manufacturing equipment is moved to the product rather than vice versa
Construction sites and movie lots re examples of this format.

Many manufacturing facilities present a combination of two labour types. E.g a given
production area may be laid out by process, while another area may be laid out by
product.

PROCESS LAYOUT
The most common approach to developing a process layout is to arrange departments
consisting of like processes in a way that optimizes their relative placement.
In many installations, optimal placement often means placing departments with large
amounts of inter department traffic adjacent to one another.
For eg a toy factory has 8 departments – shippig and receiving department, plastic
molding dept, stamping dept, metal forming dept, sewing dept, and the pinting dept. Part
for the toys are fabricated in these departments and then sent to assembly departments
where they are put together.
Let us assume that all departments have the same amount of space (40 x 40 ) and
that the uilding is 80 ft wide and 160 ft long. The first thing we would want to know are
1. the nature of the material flow between the departments
2. how the material is transported
3. the unit cost of transportation to the adjacent dept
The steps involved would be as follows:
1. first step is to make a model of inter departmental flow
2. determine the cost of the layout
3. search for departmental charges that reduce costs
Thus for the above example there are 8! Or 40320 possible arrangement

Computerized layout techniques – CRAFT

Computerized relative allocation of facilities technique
This method follows the same basic idea that we developed in the layout of the toy
factory but with some significant operational differences.
Systematic Layout Planning
In certain types of layout problems, numerical flow of items between departments either
is impractical to obtain or does not reveal the qualitative factors that may be crucial to the
placemet decision. In theses situations the venerable technique known as SLP can be
used.

PRODUCT LAYOUT
The basic difference between product and process layout is that pattern of work flow.
In process layout, the pattern can b highly variable because material for any given job
may have to be routed to the same processing department several times during its
production cycle.
In product layout, equipments or departments are dedicated to a particular product line,
duplicate equipment is employed to avoid backtracking and a straight line flow of
material movement is achievable.
Adopting a product layout makes sense when the batch size of a given product or part is
large relative to the number of different products or parts produced.

ASSEMBLY LINES
AL are a special case of product layout
The term assembly lines refers to progressive assembly linked by some material handling
device.
The usual assumption is that some form of pacing is present and the allowable processing
time is equivalent for all workstations.
The range of products partly or completely assembled on lines includes toys, appliances,
autos, planes, guns, and a wide variety of electronic components.

Assembly line balancing

The most common assembly line is a moving conveyor that passes a series of wrk
stations in a uniform time interval called the work station cycle time which is also the
time between successive units coming off the end of the line