A manufacturer of bent plywood components for the furniture industry was faced with low production efficiencies. The weekly reports in certain departments showed efficiencies around 50%, but it appeared everyone was busy and working hard. Was the problem downtime, rework, tight standards or something else? The hunch was the standards were too tight and the workers couldn’t possibly meet them.

IET performed time studies in various departments and compared those measured values with the current standards. The current standards had been developed over the years from standard data, historical data and engineering estimates. This company manufactures hundreds of different parts, so time studying all of them was out of the question. An auditing approach would give a good sample of where the problems were.

It was found that in certain departments, setup times had not been accounted for and no time was allowed. IET time studied several setups and developed some standard times. Some production standard times were found to be very tight, leading to low production efficiencies.

As a result of the standards audit, the company was able to add setup times into the standards and yield more accurate production reporting. The tight production standards would require further time study analysis to correct the standard data used to calculate them.