Work Study

Generally speaking, every organization is concerned with providing goods or offering services while utilizing men and women, machines, materials and facilities as resources. All organizations should be concerned with performing their work efficiently and economically. Work study is an effective way to coordinate and use available resources. Work study means finding the most effective way of doing a job. It entails analyzing present and preferred work systems to develop an optimal transformation of resources into desired production.

The competitive forces on today's managers greatly increase the need for work study. Specifically work analysis should result in greater productivity through improved methods that normally permit an increased output with the same or less effort. It further leads to reduced worker fatigue, improved workplace layout, better product design, more efficient materials handling and increased safety.

Work study is best applicable to large-scale repetitive manufacturing operations with standardized products and materials. In a vehicle manufacturing factory for example, where millions of identical units will be produced, work is studied in great detail to eliminate any wasted motion, to make the job easier to perform, and to find the right sequence of operations for maximum efficiency. The volumes justify the time and effort taken in work study.

But work study is finding increasing application in the office and in a variety of service operations. Although a bankers job is less routine than a job on a car assembly line, the tellers' job can be standardized for most typical transactions and the unusual cases handled by exception.

Work study can be applied in three separate phases:

1.    Analysis of the initial design of the product and the process

2.    Periodic reviews of an existing method to see if further improvements can be made

3.    Special studies to resolve problems or to incorporate changes made to the products or process.

An organization's work is accomplished by a series of interdependent operations performed by individuals at work stations. Depending on the process tasks may be connected in a line (as a car assembly) or separate but linked. The job of the work study analyst is to break down the work into its necessary elements, analyze each element to make it as efficient as possible and combine the elements into a process that efficiently produces the desired product.