How to Do Time Study in Apparel Industry?

Time Study in Industrial Engineering:

Time study is a technique of work measurement for recording time of doing a certain job or its elements carried out under certain conditions at defined rate of performance.

How to Do Time Study in Industrial Engineering?

By applying the below ways, an industrial engineer can perform time study in readymade garments industry:

1. Process Cycle or operation cycle:

Most of the works conducted on a mass scale have a repetitive nature. For example, a worker in a garment manufacturing industry performs her job again and again. She takes a bundle of cut parts, opens the bundle, takes a part from it, position it to the machine, completes sewing, ties up the bundle, keep it aside & takes another bundle. This process continues all along. The series of movements from taking a part from a bundle, fitting it, putting to the needle, sewing the part and disposing the part to the bundle of sewn parts is called a process cycle.

2. Qualified worker:

A qualified worker is a person who has the right skill, knowledge, motivation and other attributes to accomplish a job up to satisfactory level of quality, quantity and safety.

3. Observed Time:

An operator in a readymade garment industry preforms one or more processes. The time she requires to complete her job as determined by a work study officer by observing her time with the aid of a stop watch is called observed time.

4. Rating:

Different workers perform their job with different capabilities. Some workers are clever; they learn their job fast and attain a very high efficiency. Some others may be mediocre and many others may be lenient to learn or may be dull. Thus workers widely vary in their performance. Thus rating is the ultimate measure of speed with which an operator works. Rating is the speed of an operator doing a job relative to the observer’s idea of standard pace of work. Rating is thus a comparison of the rate of work observed by a work study executive with the idea of some standard level of working in his mind.

The standard rate is the average rate with which qualified workers are assumed to be able to work provided they are motivated to do the job & if right method of work is applied. Such rate of work is called as standard rating. This standard rate corresponds to 100 in the rating scale.

Scale of Rating:

The purpose of rating is to establish the standard time from recorded observed time which a qualified worker can retain throughout her working time & which can be used as a realistic basis for planning, control, target setting etc.

There are different types of rating scales use in apparel manufacturing industry. Here, we shall use British Standard Scale 100 BSI which is also known as 0-100 scale. The advantage of this scale is that 0 designates no activity while 100 represent standard rating which is normal for an average qualified worker. The details of the scale are given below.

Mayedul Islam

Mayedul Islam is a Founder and Editor of Garments Merchandising. He is an Expert in Garments Merchandising. Writing is his passion. He loves to write articles about Apparel, Textile and Garment Washing specially on Merchandising. Mail him at mayedul.islam66@gmail.com