It is no surprise today when business owners and customers demand cost improvement from manufacturers. The plant manager at this manufacturing facility wanted to know how much labor improvement was possible without sacrificing safety, quality and throughput before either of those two groups of people raised the issue. The plant manager wanted to know what was possible within the entire operation and have the data to convince himself and his management team.

The customer commissioned IET to evaluate 20 positions that covered almost 175 workers in production, quality, maintenance, purchasing, scheduling and warehouse functions. An engineer from IET measured the work content of each position with either continuous time study or work sampling techniques, and then he identified how much time was actually required to perform the job function. The next step involved job duty consolidation. The various time-savings opportunities had to be captured primarily through reassigning work duties from low utilization jobs to other ones without overloading anyone.

A thorough engineering analysis of labor work content concluded that labor costs could be reduced 5% to 10%.