INCREASING OUTPUT

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 1, 26 September 1919, Page 7

INCREASING OUTPUT

STRIKING RESULTS FROM "HUMAN SIDE"' TRAINING. At a moment when increase of output is, perhaps, tho most vital industrial problem of the day, a report of striking interest has been issued by the Industrial Fatigue Research Board. It embodies some remarkable statistics concerning the increase of output in a munitions factory resulting from special training to improve the efficiency of "the human side."

In August, l!)l-i. Mr. Vincent Jobson, managing director of the Denvenl; Foundry Co., Ltd., Derby, which wa« engaged in moulding and casting handgrenades and fuse-hole plugs, introduced si system of training directing to analysing tho various jobs, olitninating nH superfluous and unproductive movements, standardising a set of movements and a time for each process, and combining such movements as could b-' performed simultaneously.

The introduction of the new methods increa.'-od the output for jobs, including machine work, by more than 300 per cent. A-job which before the war gavo mi avorago output of f!i per day of 10 iliours was standardised ind"r <'»■< new system at 117 per day of 83 hours, an increase in hourly output of nearly 281 per cent., which was regularly surpassed by trained adult workers. As soon as training was begun the hours were reduced from 51 to 48 per week. In another report the Research Board, with tho aid of a series of graphs, demonstrates the advantages of the. shortshift over the long-shift system as tested in the oaso of women workors in a National shell factory. Efficiency for tho last hour of'tho long shifts was uniformly low, but no such uniformity was apparent in tho ease of the short shifts, several sets nf curves exhibiting no falling off at all.