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Workload, not too low or too high but just right
Practical ideas to control
workload, for business or manufacturing or medical
facility or government entity or office or shop or lab or warehouse.
Workloads will change as an organization's activity varies, that's a fact.
Workloads apply to individual people, crews, equipment, and processes.
Workloads should be high enough that the business gets its
money's worth, yet low enough that bodies and minds are not stressed, low enough that equipment and
facilities can be maintained.
JPR Services
JPR observes the workloads and quantifies objectively what they are. This provides the client a factual
basis to resolve the issues below. Further, JPR identifies constraints and limitations; and suggests
options to balance workloads and manage constraints.
Your Expectations
You can expect to resolve workload issues such as the following, after routine measurement,
analysis, and actions to control workload.
- Resolve a disagreement about workloads. A difference of opinion will not always involve
unions. A headquarters asked JPR into a plant to observe and quantify workloads, because they
differed. Other clients call when they prepare for union negotiations, or have a job overload grievance.
Time study
allows us to quantify workload objectively, and usually suggests promising options to alleviate any
problem.
- Balance workloads within a crew. The first step is to find out how long the tasks take,
then move around the elements of activity, from a heavy overload, either persons or machines,
to the
least loaded. A masonry client learned from JPR time study results how to spread the workload and
minimize lost time.
A power company used time study to determine crew and supervisory workload, assignments,
and scheduling for annual maintenance on major power generation equipment.
The same techniques resolve office workloads equally as well, as they add to the
low workload while reducing a high workload.
- Change manning as volume varies. Rare is the business with level demand and no
variation. When time study data are available, a manning calculation is mere arithmetic but without it an
answer is guesswork.
- Relieve a high workload for a constraining operation.
A basic and effective way to raise capacity is to identify constraints and address them in turn.
JPR has shown clients where equipment, crewing, or management practice restricted
output with all sorts of negative results. Once the constraints were known, they were more easily
managed.
- Recognize when workload is not the most important variable. Is the crew size set for optimum
workload or for maximum output? What do you want loaded, the operator or the constraint? Almost always
it’s the constraint. A JPR client had one operator for four automatic machines, to keep the operator
workload up. However, if more than one of the machines jammed at once, the operator, busy with one,
couldn’t un-jam the others so they sat idle. An entire product line was slowed because the machines, with
a normal percentage of jams, starved the entire manufacturing line, kept output down and product on
backorder. Of course, the real answer may be to reduce the number of jams but sometimes that doesn’t
happen.
A similar situation occurs if work performed by a few people, whose pay may be at the low end
of the scale, interferes with output of many who are better paid. A hospital’s cash flow is delayed
if operating rooms are not cleaned promptly for reuse, so a wise hospital will make sure that a crew is
always available even if they have a low workload.
- Create acceptable day-to-day operating workloads. Work expectations should be even
enough that people and unions don't complain of work overload or imbalance, at least not with cause. A client
has JPR in periodically to measure crew workload, as sales and equipment changes occur, just to have
the answer when the question arises.
Steps to
Create Acceptable Workloads
To quantify workload, someone will have to pull out a watch, and objectively
observe the
people, processes, equipment. The results serve as a basis to relate the activity to your units of output,
to consider schedule and
cycle times,
to resolve constraints, balance the loads between people and crews, suggest improvements in staffing,
workload distribution and activity
assignment, timing, working hours, sequence, changeover or setup, cross training.
Jackson Productivity is good at getting the waste out, at measuring and then modifying workload.
I can assure you that, as
with most improvement, experience helps especially in complex and rapid reaction circumstances.
When your organization needs a professional to help with
your workload situation, or just to discuss options, please call
Jack Greene at 843-422-1298. There's no cost or obligation.
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