What is Work study ? Benefits of Work Study ?

Work study:

Work study may be defined as a collection of techniques with integral communication process that are used to examine and record the work that people are doing with the objective of optimizing the skills and efforts of the people employed as individuals or groups.

In simple terms work study measures work and defines (some) performance standards. There are many uses for time estimates for tasks. Operations managers can guess or assume that a job is done in the correct time (whatever that is!) or they can be systematic and use time data gathered by a systematic technique which has reasonable accuracy. Whether or not the worker likes it - pushed hard in trying to complete a job with very tight measured work standards which don't anticipate the knotty problem encountered with a particular task - is another matter. Work study/industrial engineers need time data to plan and evaluate production/transformation processes. Rewards systems need such data for performance related bonuses. Cost calculations need to incorporate operative and machine job times Costing systems reference work study data.

Work study covers many management techniques, but it is defined broadly as:

• Method study – The systematic recording, examination and improvement of doing work in order to develop a better method.

• Work measurement – It is the name given to various techniques used to determine the time necessary for a trained worker to carry out a specific job, either at a “standard pace” or at “incentive pace” to an acceptable degree of quality.

The benefits of work study:

Work study is thus a service to management and supervision and will ensure the following benefits:

• It is a means of raising the productive efficiency of a factory or organization with little or no capital investment.

• It is systematic and ensures that no factor is overlooked.

• It is the most accurate means of setting standards upon which production planning and control can take place.

• The resultant savings start at once and continue for as long as the operations continue in the improved form.

• It is a “tool” which can be applied everywhere.

• It is one of the most penetrating tools of investigation available to management.

• To achieve the full benefit of work study, it should be applied in all areas of an organization and continuously followed.

• The full effect of work study will only be felt in an organization when all employees become accustomed to an attitude that:

• No tolerance to waste in any form, whether material, time effort or human ability.

• The refusal to accept without question that things should be done in a certain way because it is the way it has always been done.