What the heck is micromotion study?
There’s no Wikipedia article on it, and since Wikipedia covers everything, I assume it is some really esoteric thing. Is it?
From here:
http://industrialengineering.wikia.com/wiki/WorkStudy
Basically you watch someone perform a task and break it down into small increments of motion to determine how long it “should” take.
It’s a method of studying workplace efficiency/workflow/etc. It was invented by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, two management engineers who are most famous as being the parents in the book “Cheaper by the Dozen”, an autobiography written by one of their sons about growing up as one of 12 children.
Basically, you film employees working on a task, then you review the film to see where they’re acting inefficiently; i.e. are there ever times when they’re not working, are they using their hands efficiently, are any of their actions wasting time, etc. You’re looking at the individual little motions that make up the entire task, to find ways you can make the entire process more efficient by making the sub-processes more efficient.
And as a humorous side note, the individual movements whitch have standard times are called therbligs - Gilbreth (kind of) spelled backwards.
Oh, is that what it is? I learned about “that” in a marketing class when I was in college, but they called it something different. Who knew?
It seems to me that any task which could be profitably optimized by a technique like that could be even more profitably automated entirely. The whole reason you have a human on a job is for the times when the human has to stop and figure out what to do next, and the figuring-out part will look to the camera exactly like idleness.
Well it was developed sometime in the 1940’s IIRC.
Not a lot of opportunity for automation back then. AT least not for the very complex tasks workers were required for.