Work Measurement
Vital inputs for:
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Manpower planning
Reducing labour costs
Scheduling
Budgeting
Designing incentive systems
Standard Time
Amount of time a qualified worker should spend to complete a
specified task, working at sustainable rate, using given methods,
tools and equipment, raw material and workplace
Most commonly used methods of work measurement:
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Time study
Historical times
Predetermined data
Work sampling
Work Measurement
Time Study
• Most widely used method of work measurement
• Especially appropriate for short, repetitive tasks
Average of a few properly trained workers’
performed time are taken as the standard
Basic steps:
• Define the task to be studied, and inform the worker(s) who will be studied
• Determine the number of cycles to be observed
• Time the job and rate the performance
• Compute the standard time
Breakdown of work into elements
Work Measurement
Standard Elemental Time (SET)
derived from a firm’s own historical time study data
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A time study department accumulates a file of elemental times that
are common to many jobs
After a certain point, many elemental times can be retrieved from the
file
Eliminate need for analysts to go through a complete time study to
obtain those
Predetermined Time Standards (PDTS)
published data on standard elemental times
• Commonly used system is Method-Time Measurement (MTM)
• MTM tables are based on extensive research of basic elemental times
Work Measurement
Work Sampling
is a technique for estimating the proportion of time that a worker
or machine spends on various activities and the idle time.
appropriate for long, non-repetitive tasks
Two primary uses:
• Ratio-delay studies: concern the percentage of
worker’s time that involves unavoidable delays
• Analysis of non-repetitive jobs: percentage of
time an employee spends doing various jobs
Work Measurement
Observed Time (OT): simply the average of the recorded times
x
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OT 
i
n
Normal Time (NT): observed time adjusted for worker performance
NT  OT * PR
Standard Time (ST): normal time required for a job plus
an allowance time for different delays
ST  NT * AF
For job time
For time worked
AFjob 1  A
AF day
1
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1 A