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OPINION seems to be divided as to whether work study should be recognised and represented at the highest level of management or whether is should be just another department similar in status to the wages office. Of course, there is no question in so far as the practitioners are concerned—they think they should be accorded high professional status—full stop.

THE centripetal forces at work in the world seem to draw all human associations into larger groups. Work Study has been no exception to this, as the formation of a European Federation six months ago indicates. Another manifestation of the same tendency is the letter we print from a correspondent suggesting that there is only room for one professional organisation for Work Study in this country.

MUCH has been written about industrial engineering, especially in regard to American practice, but a good deal of confusion still exists about the whole subject.

‘FOG in Channel: Continent isolated!’ Those were once the headlines in a national newspaper which thus succinctly, although with unintentional irony, expressed the British sense of complacency. Making allowance for an element of exaggeration, the incident contained enough truth to make its point. The new alignments of industry and commerce which are now taking place mean that this country cannot afford to retain even a vestige of such an attitude.

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.

THE ideal to which all payment for work is striving is to reward “a fair day's work” by “a fair day's pay”. The two most usual methods of payment used in the attempt to achieve this ideal are:

IT is a long time since The Life of Johnson defined man as a tool‐making animal, and the tools he used in those days were primitive when contrasted with the precise, complicated and sophisticated ones employed today. Early tools were really evolved through centuries as necessary extensions of a man's arms. A spade gave them leverage and a longer reach.

WHATEVER one's personal political beliefs, that this country cannot afford the luxury of millions of men out of work is obvious. This applies whether the workers simply cannot find work or if, for one reason or another, they refrain from working.

MILLIONS of pounds have been recklessly thrown away by the naive Government on useless so‐called defence contracts. The greatest loss has been sustained by the aircraft industry and anyone who has had any experience at all of that industry will find nothing remarkable in such a statement.

The purpose of this study is to enhance the output of a manufacturing set-up in phases, by identifying the wastages in the existing line and, thereby, reducing them.

Feasibility checking and optimization of capacity enhancement of a processing line have been discussed. Value stream mapping (VSM) methodology has been used as a data-driven decision-making tool to identify the constraints in the current state and subsequent states. The future state has been achieved in stages using VSM tool of lean manufacturing, coupled with the management philosophy of Theory of Constraints. An example of an Indian company has been added to demonstrate the suitability of the approach.

The proposed approach addresses an important issue of phased increase in customer demand and the process of accommodating it through multi-phased maneuvering of productive capacity at constraint points instead of enhancing the capacity at one go. The underlying problem of capacity enhancement has been addressed using lean principles and the optimum feasible option has been designed so that the increase in cost is minimized along with satisfying the stepwise increase in demand.

This research work is applicable to the manufacturing sector.

This paper proposes a methodology for phased upgrading of a production flow-line in keeping with a steady increase in customer demand. Here, VSM has been applied in a phased manner, and the constraint in the current state as well as in each subsequent phase has been identified and removed.