Productivity Improvement Using Time Studies: A Practical Guide

  • Productivity improvement through time study works because you can't improve what you don't measure. A time study converts "it feels slow" into quantified cycle time, isolates where time is actually lost, and gives you a baseline to prove that an improvement worked.
  • Here's a practical, step-by-step guide to doing it the way an industrial engineer would
    • Define and document the current method
    • Measure it element by element
    • Separate value-added from non-value-added time
    • Compute the engineered standard
    • Attack the largest non-value-added elements
    • Re-measure to confirm the gain and lock it in