I have personally visited many garment making factories in many parts of Asia, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Sri Lanka. Most of the large factories have some form of measurement system in place. There are two kinds of measurements: Stop-watch time study and Predetermined Motion and Time System. Stop-watch time study can be commonly found in many established garment making factories. Such time study is one example of measurement. Most people regard it as a major part of the scientific management. It is easy to learn and perform. Unfortunately, many challenges of doing stop-watch time study have been overlooked and ignored which results in inaccurate and unreliable time values.
Of the many factories I have visited, I found the analysts doing stop-watch time study in the very odd ways. To sum it all, there are 3 ‘incompletes’.
Firstly, the job is not broken down into smaller elements. One of the objectives of time study is to investigate the methods used in performing the job. By analyzing the methods in detail, one would be able to learn the basic movements of human body thus eliminate wastes. When a job is not broken down into smaller elements in a stop-watch time study, the time value obtained is as good as sleeping through the entire roller coaster ride.
Secondly, the number of observation is not justifiable. Some factories have policies in their stop-watch time study that they only collect 15 or 20 observations. I find it baseless to have fixed the number of observation to a constant number. This has deviated from the fundamentals of time study which is based on sampling. A proper stop-watch time study should be able to justify the confidence level of the time value obtained by taking justified number of observations.
Thirdly, the elimination of performance rating. It is necessary to rate the performance of the operator while observing the work. Among many reasons, the operator being timed may purposely slow down knowing that once his/her allowed time is set to become the standard time, they will be earning more by merely working on the normal working pace. Unfortunately, most time studies are done without performance rating.
Anyone of the 3 killers above is good enough to make the stop-watch study a meaningless one. A stop-watch time study must be performed properly according to its standard procedures in order to achieve desired results with certain confidence level. Are the Industrial Engineers in the garment factories overloaded with other responsibilities that they have to use a short-cut to their time study?
G.PRO IEES 