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RARELY has its sense of timing and pragmatic approach to current problems been better employed by the Industrial Society than in organizing a two‐day conference within four days of Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. The aim behind ‘Into Europe—People at Work’ was badly needed. No major policy has been so bedevilled by confusion and uncertainty as our entry, greeted with a fanfare by some and lamented by a dirge from others.

Automation and the new buzzword, “Industry 4.0”, have dominated the media headlines in recent months. In this scenario, apparel manufacturers should not only install automatic machines but also standardise them based on specific industry requirements, and precise measures are required for daily target demands.

This study demonstrates the application of Predetermined Motion and Time System (PMTS) tools in various automatic and semiautomatic machines to obtain higher productivity and the highest utilisation percentage of operator and automats between the 1:1 and 1:2 man vs machine configuration models. In this study, timeSSD® was used to calculate the micro motions of humans. In addition, a video annotation and modelling software Tracker was used to calculate high-speed machine movements with loading frames of 30 FPS.

After the implementation of PMTS tools, it was found that for a 1:1 man vs machine configuration, the operator utilisation is 75% per shift and the operator idle time is 50% per cycle time, and the operator is sitting idle for 2 h per 8 h of shift. So, there is scope to improve the utilisation and idle time of operator.

With the PMTS software, an industrial engineer professional with knowledge of the micromotion economy can only calculate micromotion.

Exploring the first time in the world to establish standard allowed minute (SAM) of a partly automated single-unit sewing machine with partial human intervention and a semiautomatic machine. Theoretical underpinnings indicate that manufacturers use the experience to determine the SAM of any operation over time, necessitating this work to calculate standard minutes automatically.

The purpose of this paper is to address and solve operational problems of an automotive industry in reaching production target by adopting Maynard Operation Sequence Technique (MOST) as lean and productivity improvement strategies.

In the undertaken case of auto-car rear window assembly line, a recurring production shortfall in fulfilling the daily demand is seemingly due to inappropriate work method. Initial observation of the operations led to suspect certain lapses in initiatives to adopt the time standards, to reduce or eliminate non-value added motions, to design suitable aisle and to assign tasks among workstations in a balanced manner. Subsequently an attempt is made to pinpoint the causes of poor performance and the bottlenecks through process flow analysis and time study by applying MOST. The elemental tasks are closely examined for possible reduction of workstation times by choosing efficient work methods with ergonomic features. Thus appropriate hand tools, jigs and fixture with nominal investment are prescribed to incorporate in the assembly works. The operational changes as steered by the MOST application have enhanced the workflow with a shorter cycle time which led to a substantial increase in productivity.

The productivity of the assembly line is increased by more than 29 percent from the earlier capacity through the MOST application which is deemed to meet the current level of demand.

The adopted framework for recognizing the effectiveness of MOST to expose and rectify the flaws in work methods without much investment is expected to be beneficial for a manufacturer in securing the competitiveness.

Time standards are essential to plan and analyze manufacturing processes. A key element of process planning that is not generated from a typical computer‐aided process plan (CAPP) is the process time standards. Generative process planning that includes time standards is particularly needed in the construction steel building (CSB) industry due to variability in projects (orders) size and content. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to focus on incorporating time standards into CAPP of CSB.

Empirical formulas are developed to generate time standards for variant steel beams based on their CAD files (design parameters and geometry) and process parameters (operational conditions). A Motion and Time Study (MTS) is used to estimate times for manual work elements such as load/unload activities and to validate the generated time standards. A generic parametric model is developed with Excel and integrated into the CAPP system to automatically estimate the standard time of each process operation.

Results showed that developing the time standards module for process operations and integrating its spreadsheets into a generative CAPP has helped process planners to arrive at better estimates of process parameters and has helped production management and the overall project management process in CSB industry.

The application of the proposed approach is not limited to CSB industry but it can also contribute to the continuing growth of CAPP applications in other industries.

The study is unique since it incorporates time standards into the architecture of CAPP system for accurate time and cost estimation and effective resource allocation and project management and it utilizes motion and time study (MTS) to collect complementary process data and validate the model‐generated cycle times.

Labor planning is a key component of production/operations management. A productive organization needs a workforce that is of the right size, is competent and is well‐motivated. Production/operations managers need to understand the tools and techniques at their disposal to create such a workforce. This paper examines some of the key issues relating to labor planning and management, and introduces some of the available approaches and tools that can help shape and direct a workforce to productive ends.

Maintainability is a critical design characteristic that shows how well a product can be maintained; maintenance time is a comprehensive parameter of product maintainability design. This paper aims to provide an integrated methodology for complex product maintainability verification and maintenance time prediction using virtual prototypes and humans in a virtual dynamic simulation of the maintenance process.

An integrated platform for maintainability verification and maintenance time prediction is designed. Decomposition of maintenance tasks, corrective measurement time method, and an impact matrix of maintenance therbligs and time are presented.

The proposed methodology can efficiently conduct complex product maintainability verification and maintenance time prediction.

Early and effective verification and prediction of the maintainability and maintenance time program can significantly improve the maintainability and availability of a complex product.

A universally applicable method for product maintainability verification and maintenance time prediction is presented.

In these days of total quality management, business process re‐engineering, etc. it is easy to forget tried and tested approaches to productivity and performance measurement and improvement. Work measurement, for example, has been around for many years but still can be extremely effective in informing us of the working times, and delays, inherent in different ways of carrying out work.

IN this issue there is a Letter to the Editor (page 42). Its author is D. A. Barron, Chief Work Study Engineer of Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd., at Basildon. The letter is important from two aspects. Firstly, because it enables the writer of this column to clear up any misconceptions lingering in people's minds regarding references to Charles Bedaux in past editorials appearing in this journal.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the scope of robust dispersion control charts in a distribution-free environment, which is a specific case of non-normal control charts. These control charts are skewness-based structures designed to monitor skewed-type processes whilst equally performing under symmetric processes. Moreover, the choice of a suitable control chart for a particular non-normal situation is also suggested.

The probability control limits approach is considered as an alternative way to determine the skewness-based structure of dispersion control charts. The proposals of five robust and two conventional Shewhart-type dispersion control charts are suggested as efficient competitors of skewness correction (SC) dispersion control charts. The evaluation of robust proposals and competing dispersion control charts is done through false alarm rate (FAR) and probability to signal (PTS) measures.

The proposed dispersion control charts are found robust and efficient alternatives of SC dispersion control charts in both normal and non-normal distributions. The FARs and PTS properties of proposed control charts are impressive in all studied cases, and a real-data example also verifies the dominance of proposed control charts.

Conventional dispersion control charts quickly lose their efficiency as underlying process distribution deviates from normality; however, robust control charts emerge as most suitable candidates in such situations. This paper proposes the idea of robust dispersion control charts under a distribution-free structure for the skewed-type process, which is not yet explored.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.