Making Hotplates
Making Hotplates
Timothy Vallin
BUS 644 Operations Management
Instructor: Dr. Ronald Beach
November 18, 2012
Making Hotplates A group of 10 workers were responsible for assembling hotplates. The employees were all placed on an assembly line. An assembly line is standardized layouts arranged according to a fixed sequence of assembly tasks (Stevenson, 2011). The assembly line was balanced by industrial engineers. Line balancing is the process of assigning tasks to workstations in such a way that the workstations have approximately equal time requirements (Stevenson, 2011). A time and motion study was used to break down the jobs. Each subassembly tasks required about three minutes to accomplish. The tasks were balanced in order for the workers to use the same amount of time to perform their tasks.
. While the hotplates were assembled, there was an increase in productivity due to changes in the operation. Productivity is a measure of the effective use of resources usually expressed as the ration of output to input (Stevenson, 2011). The changes that were made were each employee began assembling their own hotplates individually. This may have required process layouts which are layouts that can handle varied processing requirements (Stevenson, 2011). This was a risk with uncertainty but this method caused a rapid increase in productivity that leveled off by the end of the year at an amazing 84 percent higher than in the previous half year. What may have affected the increase is that as a worker performs a task often, they get better at it and require less time. This means that there is a strong possibility that some workers did not need an entire 3 minutes to complete their part of the job. Giving those workers 3 minutes to perform their task that may have taken less time means a constraint or drop in productivity because they would have to wait in order to continue. By allowing the workers to do more than just one task may have taken out the boredom of
Timothy Vallin
BUS 644 Operations Management
Instructor: Dr. Ronald Beach
November 18, 2012
Making Hotplates A group of 10 workers were responsible for assembling hotplates. The employees were all placed on an assembly line. An assembly line is standardized layouts arranged according to a fixed sequence of assembly tasks (Stevenson, 2011). The assembly line was balanced by industrial engineers. Line balancing is the process of assigning tasks to workstations in such a way that the workstations have approximately equal time requirements (Stevenson, 2011). A time and motion study was used to break down the jobs. Each subassembly tasks required about three minutes to accomplish. The tasks were balanced in order for the workers to use the same amount of time to perform their tasks.
. While the hotplates were assembled, there was an increase in productivity due to changes in the operation. Productivity is a measure of the effective use of resources usually expressed as the ration of output to input (Stevenson, 2011). The changes that were made were each employee began assembling their own hotplates individually. This may have required process layouts which are layouts that can handle varied processing requirements (Stevenson, 2011). This was a risk with uncertainty but this method caused a rapid increase in productivity that leveled off by the end of the year at an amazing 84 percent higher than in the previous half year. What may have affected the increase is that as a worker performs a task often, they get better at it and require less time. This means that there is a strong possibility that some workers did not need an entire 3 minutes to complete their part of the job. Giving those workers 3 minutes to perform their task that may have taken less time means a constraint or drop in productivity because they would have to wait in order to continue. By allowing the workers to do more than just one task may have taken out the boredom of