Tuesday, 2 March 2021

Performance Rating, Allowances & Work Sampling (IEM Work Study 02March 2021)

Performance Rating:

Performance rating is that process, during which the time study engineer compares the performance of the operator under observation with his own concept of normal performance.

Performance Rating is the step in the work measurement in which the analyst observes the worker’s performance and records a value representing that performance relative to the analyst’s concept of standard performance.

 

In mathematical term,



The concept of normal performance, must be such that the time standards are set from it, are within the capacity of the majority of workers in the enterprise.

It would be of no use in setting standards so high that only the best worker could attain them since programmes or estimates based on them would never be fulfilled.


Allowances:

To get the standard time, a proper allowance must be added considering the working condi­tions.

While deciding the quantum (generally in terms of percentages) of allowance to be added to the normal time, following types of allowances are considered:

 

1. Relaxation Allowance:

This allowance depends upon the nature of the job, and includes following two categories of allowances:

(A) Personal Need Allowance:

It provides for the necessity to go away from the work place to attend the personal needs such as washing, going to lavatory, getting a drink etc. It is commonly taken as 5% for male and 7% for female worker.

(B) Fatigue Allowance:

Fatigue allowance is provided to recover a worker from the physi­ological and psychological effect of carrying out work.


2. Interference Allowance:

When one worker is attending more than one machine, then, interference is the time for which one or more machine units remain idle while attendant is occupied with the work on other machine units. The allowance provided to compensate this idleness due to interference is known as interference allowance.

 

3. Process Allowance:

This is an allowance provided to compensate for enforced idleness during a process. This includes loss of time due to (t) no work (ii) power failure, (iii) faulty material, (iv) faulty tools or equipment’s.

 

4. Contingency Allowance:

This is an allowance of time to meet legitimate, irregular and infrequent items of work or delays which cannot economically be measured correctly. It is usually taken as less than 5%.

 

5. Special Allowance:

These allowances are decided as a policy matter of management. These are allowed for activities which are normally not a part of the operation cycles but are essential for satisfactory performance of work.

 

Work Sampling:

Work sampling is a statistically based technique utilized for analysing work performance and machine utilization by direct observation, but without a stop watch. So work sampling is another useful technique of work study.

This technique is particularly useful to estimate the proportion of delays or idleness’s occurring in a enterprise/plant and attributing the cause for it, such as power failures/input delays, machine cleaning, machine breakdowns and manpower idling or in other words, estimating proportion of time spent by an executive in attending meetings, telephoning or reading etc.

The stop watch technique for time estimation is extremely time consuming and therefore not feasible.

Work sampling is a technique for establishing standard times of activities. This method also known as activity sampling was devised by L.H.C. Tippet in 1934. This technique is more suitable for analysing group activities and repetitive activities which take longer duration.

If a given individual performs more than one activity, then the time standard for each activity can be computed with the help of this method. For example, on a printing press, a single operator/worker will be doing composing, proofreading, printing etc. The time standards for all these activities can be determined with the help of work sampling method.

The method of work sampling consists of taking a large number of instantaneous observations randomly, rather than taking observations continuously as is done in various production investigations/ studies. This method is a sampling technique and depends upon laws of probability.

A sample taken at random from a large population provides a good estimate of the distribution of the population because it tends to have the same distribution as the population.

 

Some examples are as follows:

(1) A decision regarding the cooking of rice is taken by having a sample of rice from a boiling/ cooking pot and pressed between fingers.

(2) A decision regarding the quality of wheat bag to be purchased is made by examining a sample of wheat from a bag.

Hence, work sampling is a technique of determining the percentage occurrences of a certain activity (a group of processes, machines, or workers) with the help of statistical sampling and random observations. When the sample size is large enough and random observations are made indeed, there is quite a high probability that the observations would reflect the real situation plus minus a certain margin of error.


Definition of Work Sampling:

“Work sampling is a method in which a large number of instantaneous observations are made at random time intervals over a period of time or a group of machines, workers or processes/operations. Each observation records what is happening at that instant and the percentage of observations recorded for a particular activity or delay/idleness is a measure of the percentage of time during which that activity or delay/idleness occurs”.

 


No comments:

Post a Comment