Work Organization and Methods Engineering for Productivity

Work Organization and Methods Engineering for Productivity provides an introduction to, and practical advice on, assessing methods of working to achieve maximum output and efficiency. The main focus of the book is on the ‘work study’, which helps to increase the productivity of men, machines and materials. We are currently seeing a lot of disruptive advancement in industrial operations caused by technologies, including artificial intelligence and IoT. Against this technological backdrop, and with ever increasing focus on value, the fundamental understanding of how to analyze and organize the workplace for productivity is more important than ever. Case studies and illustrations throughout make this book a much have for managers with responsibility for production and planning in industry. Helps the reader understand the fundamental factors affecting productivity, along with their relevance to work organization Includes valuable industry case studies from sectors including manufacturing, textile production and sea port operations Includes several formats and charts that are important in the recording of data for practical work studies

Practical, up-to-date coverage for a new generation of engineering and management professionals. Lawrence S. Aft s Productivity, Measurement, and Improvement has long served as a seminal reference for students and professionals in industrial engineering, quality management, and other related fields. Now Work Measurement and Methods Improvement brings his work right up to date with the demands of today s rapidly changing marketplace, where work measurement and methods improvement have a vital role to play in improving quality and enhancing productivity in a wide range of industries. Accessible and easy to follow, this book presents solid, practical coverage of the key principles and practices of work measurement. It explains the purpose, use, advantages, and limitations of tools and methods for: * Work analysis including graphical productivity analysis and work methods improvement * Product measurement from time study and standard data systems to work sampling and labor reporting issues * Product improvement ergonomics, incentive systems, continuous improvement, process improvement, and more With straightforward examples, chapter-end summaries, review questions, and practice exercises that emphasize the application of fundamental concepts, Work Measurement and Methods Improvement is an essential reference for current and future professionals who must do the work and manage the process to achieve better quality, higher productivity, and powerhouse performance for their organization.

Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity. The results of their work, Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, includes chapters covering definitions and core concepts related to productivity, guidelines for measuring productivity in specific contexts, best practices and pitfalls, and theories and open questions on productivity. You'll benefit from the many short chapters, each offering a focused discussion on one aspect of productivity in software engineering. Readers in many fields and industries will benefit from their collected work. Developers wanting to improve their personal productivity, will learn effective strategies for overcoming common issues that interfere with progress. Organizations thinking about building internal programs for measuring productivity of programmers and teams will learn best practices from industry and researchers in measuring productivity. And researchers can leverage the conceptual frameworks and rich body of literature in the book to effectively pursue new research directions. What You'll LearnReview the definitions and dimensions of software productivity See how time management is having the opposite of the intended effect Develop valuable dashboards Understand the impact of sensors on productivity Avoid software development waste Work with human-centered methods to measure productivity Look at the intersection of neuroscience and productivity Manage interruptions and context-switching Who Book Is For Industry developers and those responsible for seminar-style courses that include a segment on software developer productivity. Chapters are written for a generalist audience, without excessive use of technical terminology.

Total Quality Management: Key Concepts and Case Studies provides the full range of management principles and practices that govern the quality function. The book covers the fundamentals and background needed, as well as industry case studies and comprehensive topic coverage, making it an invaluable reference to both the novice and the more experienced individual. Aspects of quality control that are widely utilized in practice are combined with those that are commonly referred to on University courses, and the latest developments in quality concepts are also presented. This book is an ideal quick reference for any manager, designer, engineer, or researcher interested in quality. Features two chapters on the latest ISO standards Includes an introduction to statistics to help the reader fully grasp content on statistical quality control Contains case studies that explore many TQM themes in real life situations

ALLEN/GETTING THINGS DONE

From the automotive industry to the semiconductor industry, manufacturers are suffering from an overabundance of automation methods that they cannot fully comprehend or afford, and glamorous leadership techniques that are simply not sustainable. In this respect, management has lost its way. Beyond World-Class Productivity shows why a return to traditional tools and the power of people can help companies meet today’s challenges in the manufacturing sector. Beyond World-Class Productivity gives readers a balance of essential information, theory and case studies. Readers can expect to gain new insights into engineering approaches to productivity, profitability and real or non-real gain, including: • useful tools for industrial engineering • effectiveness in unit labor costs; • feasibility studies • work simplification; and • developing mind innovation. Practical examples and their accompanying commentary come from the author’s 40 years of real-world experience on the shop floor and in the boardroom. Figures are also provided to illustrate actual productivity results from real companies. Both managers and engineers can appreciate Beyond World-Class Productivity as an enlightening guide to the improvement of productivity and profitability within the manufacturing sector.

By one analysis, a 12 percent annual increase in data processing budgets for U.S. corporations has yielded annual productivity gains of less than 2 percent. Why? This timely book provides some insights by exploring the linkages among individual, group, and organizational productivity. The authors examine how to translate workers' productivity increases into gains for the entire organization, and discuss why huge investments in automation and other innovations have failed to boost productivity. Leading experts explore how processes such as problem solving prompt changes in productivity and how inertia and other characteristics of organizations stall productivity. The book examines problems in productivity measurement and presents solutions. Also examined in this useful book are linkage issues in the fields of software engineering and computer-aided design and why organizational downsizing has not resulted in commensurate productivity gains. Important theoretical and practical implications contribute to this volume's usefulness to business and technology managers, human resources specialists, policymakers, and researchers.

From the automotive industry to the semiconductor industry, manufacturers are suffering from an overabundance of automation methods that they cannot fully comprehend or afford, and glamorous leadership techniques that are simply not sustainable. In this respect, management has lost its way. Beyond World-Class Productivity shows why a return to traditional tools and the power of people can help companies meet today’s challenges in the manufacturing sector. Beyond World-Class Productivity gives readers a balance of essential information, theory and case studies. Readers can expect to gain new insights into engineering approaches to productivity, profitability and real or non-real gain, including: • useful tools for industrial engineering • effectiveness in unit labor costs; • feasibility studies • work simplification; and • developing mind innovation. Practical examples and their accompanying commentary come from the author’s 40 years of real-world experience on the shop floor and in the boardroom. Figures are also provided to illustrate actual productivity results from real companies. Both managers and engineers can appreciate Beyond World-Class Productivity as an enlightening guide to the improvement of productivity and profitability within the manufacturing sector.

Born of thirteen years of field research, this interdisciplinary work explores the complex intersections of technology, class, gender, and ecology in the transnational milieu of Mexico's maquiladoras, foreign-owned assembly plants located along the U.S. border. Devon Peña examines workplace and community struggles from the perspective of the women who work in the maquiladoras. He describes the workers' struggles for workplace democracy, social justice, and sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from the factory to the community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s. Female maquila workers are typically portrayed as passive, apolitical, and easily exploited. This book, however, presents an opposing view, investigating the "subaltern life of the shop floor"—the workers' informal methods of resistance to hazardous conditions, sexual harassment, and managerial tyranny. Using survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author develops a cogent critique of labor-process theory, a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras. The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternatives in the direction of ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate modes of development.

A highly motivated, competent work force is vital to an organization's success. Creating Productive Organizations is an interactive manual that challenges and encourages readers to assess and develop a clear vision of their areas of competence and interest in order to enhance productivity. Basic, common sense information about people, jobs, and the workplace is presented using simple descriptions, methods, contemporary examples and illustrations. Readers are skillfully guided through the process of identifying and defining their skills, abilities, beliefs, values, work methods, knowledge, and strengths. Step-by-step guidelines enable readers to evaluate and more closely match their talents, goals, and visions with current and future demands of the constantly changing workplace. Written for supervisors, managers, leaders, mentors, work teams members, academicians, students, and anyone striving to learn more about themselves in order to increase job satisfaction and overall performance. Creating Productive Organizations is an excellent stand-alone resource-however, the facilitator's guide is recommended for industry training or classroom use. Facilitator's Guide The facilitator's guide is a multilevel, experiential teaching tool that provides activities, inventories, questionnaires, surveys and discussion resources for individual and group use. Its content follows the same format as the manual and is designed to supplement and reinforce material presented in each chapter.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

Here at last is a major revision of a definitive reference on industrial engineering principles and practices. It includes these topics: the industrial function; industrial engineering in practice; methods engineering; work-measurement techniques; work-measurement application and control; incentive programs; manufacturing engineering; human factors, ergonomics, and human relations; economics and controls; facilities and material flow; mathematics and optimization techniques; and special industry applications. With 800 illustrations and an index.

Faced with increasing global competition, every industry, business, and service organization is restructuring itself to operate more effectively. Cost-effectiveness and product reliability without excess capacity are the keys to successful activity in business, industry, and government, and these keys are the end results of methods engineering.. The 11th edition of Methods, Standards, and Work Design provides practical, up-to-date descriptions of engineering methods to measure, analyze, and design manual work. The text emphasizes both the manual components and the cognitive aspects of work, recognizing the gradual decline of the manufacturing sector and the growth of the service sector. The importance of ergonomics and work design as part of methods engineering is emphasized not only to increase productivity, but also to improve worker health and safety, and thus, company bottom-line costs..

Over the last decade, Method Engineering, defined as the engineering discipline to design, construct and adapt methods, including supportive tools, has emerged as the research and application area for using methods for systems development. This book contains the papers from the IFIP Working Group 8.1 conference on Situational Method Engineering.

This book focuses on the application of workstudy in productivity of manufacturing SMEs locally and abroad and also explores various industrial problems which face manufacturing SMEs in developing and underdeveloped countries in the rest of the world. Low productivity is currently a serious challenge facing manufacturing SMEs, where these SMEs are operating below expected production output levels which makes it difficult for them to compete in the global market. SMEs are the engine drivers of economic growth, one of which is manufacturing. The challenge is that government from various countries in developing and underdeveloped countries, mandated agencies in their respective areas, to ensure that there is economic progress for these SMEs, but productivity remains low in the manufacturing SMEs. When SMEs do not perform well, productivity of manufacturing SMEs declines and unemployment increases. Thus, an increase in unemployment results in a drop of GDP in the country and can become a global and economic crisis. This book describes a process which enables the reader to use effective knowledge that addresses problems facing the productivity of manufacturing SMEs such as work study tools and case studies and provides solutions and applications to improve the running of the manufacturing SMEs in growing their productivity.