Long live work measurement.

INNOVATION AND ADVANCEMENT owe their sustainable foundation to some measurement scale. We must measure work before we can improve it. This means that we still need work measurement.

Like most academics, I read many things, from the impressive Industrial Engineer magazine, newspapers, and technical journals to financial reports. One common thread that I have noticed is the goal of achieving improvement in something, be it product, process, service, or results. How can we improve anything if we don't know how long it takes us to accomplish the item in the first place?

Six Sigma, lean, TQM, 5s, theory of constraints, supply networking, and so on all have the same underlying principles of improving work elements. Why then are industrial engineers shunning the foundational heritage of work measurement instead of celebrating it?

Industrial engineers are called upon to facilitate the integration and coordination of cutting-edge technologies. Response to such calls cannot succeed without a basic understanding and measurement of time, motion, and performance of the technologies. Interoperability metrology may sound more erudite, but it still says the same thing about measuring how work occurs across technologies.

Fast-changing operating environments that we face nowadays necessitate interdisciplinary improvement projects that may involve physicists, material scientists, chemists, engineers, bio-scientists, and a host of other disciplines. They may all use different measurement scales and communicate in different jargons. But the common thread of work measurement permeates collective improvement efforts.

We should not shy away from work measurement because of the inglorious past falsely associated with it. It should be embraced as the forerunner and heritage of new approaches to pursuing improvement in industrial operations. Work measurement, under whatever trendy names we choose, must remain a core competency of industrial engineering.

Measurement of productivity, human performance, and resource consumption are essential components of achieving organizational goals and increasing profitability. Work rate analysis, centered on work measurement, helps identify areas where operational efficiency and improvement can be pursued.

In many production settings, workers encounter production breaks that require an analysis of the impact on production output. Whether breaks are standard and scheduled or nonstandard and unscheduled, the workstation is subject to work rate slowdown (ramp-down) and work rate pickup (ramp-up), respectively, before and after a break. These impacts are subtle and are hardly noticed unless a formal engineered work measurement is put in place.

In contemporary practice of industrial engineering, practitioners, researchers, students, and policy makers must embrace and promote this time-tested tool of productivity improvement. It is an operational legacy that we should stand by rather than walk away from.

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Adedeji Badiru is a professor and department head of the Department of Industrial and Information Engineering at the University of Tennessee. A registered engineer, he is also the director of the IE Center for Industrial Development Research.

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