Workstudy and Ergonomics - Does it really happen?

sweet_honey

We are studying Workstudy and Ergonomics in this semester.
We are taught that each and every movement of the worker is recorded to calculate the standard time.. Even the separate movements of left and right hand..
I want to ask that does it really happens in the industries to increase the productivity??

yes they do.this is very important.its more or less used in mass assembly lines and in some cases in production facilities.why is this necessary?
its because people are different from each other and the way one worker assembles a product or operates a machine or loads the work piece into the machine is going to be diffeent from the person next to him, unless of course they are both trained. thus experts perform a study and come up with the safest, easiest and most efficient work pocedure possible and this information is imparted to the worker in a form of training and also pasted near the work area as instructions. i must also mention that the timing of work procedures are critical to production numbers. so a cutoff target is calculated for the shift based on these work procedues and/without machine cycle time and the workers are expected to keep up the target un

oops looks likea bit of my answer got chopped.just wanted to conclude that cycle time/work movement time is the key to numbers and numbers are the key to a companies profits

roon.mech

oops looks likea bit of my answer got chopped.just wanted to conclude that cycle time/work movement time is the key to numbers and numbers are the key to a companies profits

Does it occur in small industries also or just in big industries?
How is it decided that a company needs to go for the workstudy?

sweet_honey

Does it occur in small industries also or just in big industries?
How is it decided that a company needs to go for the workstudy?

If you mean small scale or big scale industries then I am not really sure about this.
Generally it is followed by most Tier-1 facilities.

But again it depends upon the need and necessity to implement such a scheme.
there could be some very obvious reasons why it is decided to go for a work study.
I have not a had a hand in implementing any work studies but the following are my own speculations for the reasons to go in for one:

Of course this is not required at all, if an assembly procedure is very simple.
But when a complex assembly procedure involves plenty of hand movements, manual work-piece transportation etc, and involving a dozen or so workers, this is typically valid, because the worker is under pressure to keep daily targets and its likely that he might do things "his own way", causing the production to drop (even though me may be sincere) or say something worse, like in a machine shop, getting his hand unwittingly caught in the machine. This can cause huge problems again with the union and ultimately a demand will be made to the management for lower targets based on this reason alone. Management may want to avoid that.

Also these companies are audited frequently and thus they need to study and implement these methods to allow them certain certifications.

Numbers - Production executives are always under pressure from top management to shave off a second or two from the process towards continual improvement. No one will expect you to produce the same numbers the following year as the previous.
A work study, if newly initiated could make a big difference because the existing process has already been very finely tuned and you are going an extra step to tune it a little bit more.