Tag: time and motion studies

OM Podcast #5: NASCAR Pit Stops

Welcome to our latest Operations Management podcast! Today, Jay Heizer and Barry Render discuss the OM side of NASCAR racing pitstops in this 9-minute recording. Chapter 10 of the text opens with a Global Company Profile featuring NASCAR. Racing teams’ use of time and motion studies are great examples of operational efficiency. In the podcast, Jay and Barry also describe how Formula One racing approaches to pit stops have helped a hospital and a pharma manufacturer.

 

Transcript

A transcript in Word of this podcast is available by clicking on the word Transcript above.

Instructors, assignable auto-graded exercises using this podcast are available in MyLab OM.  Contact your Pearson rep to learn more!  https://www.pearson.com/us/contact-us/find-your-rep.html

OM in the News: Time & Motion Studies and Knee Surgery

“Competitive forces are out of whack in health care,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 22, 2018). Hospitals are often ignorant about their actual costs. Instead, they often increase prices to meet profit targets. For nearly a decade, Gundersen Health System’s hospital in Wisconsin boosted the price of knee-replacement surgery 3% a year till the list price was more than $50,000, including the doctors. Yet administrators admitted they had no idea what it cost to perform the surgery—the most common for hospitals outside of childbirth.

So during an 18-month review, a Time & Motion expert trailed doctors and nurses to record every minute of activity and note instruments, resources and medicines used. The hospital tallied the time nurses spent wheeling around VCR carts, a mismatch of available postsurgery beds, unnecessarily costly bone cement, and delays dispatching physical therapists to get patients moving. The actual cost? $10,550–everything included. On average, a nurse assistant needed 10 minutes to collect personal items from patients before surgery. A technician took another 20 minutes to insert an IV into patients. Time spent in Gundersen’s operating room—the most expensive minutes of a patient’s hospital visit—averaged 95 to 105 minutes.

On busy days, the hospital had no available beds for knee-replacement patients after surgery. Patients with nowhere to go remained in temporary postsurgical units for as long as 24 hours, prolonging their recovery. Also, the hospital had been exclusively using brand-name cement, premixed with antibiotics. It slashed its cement costs by 57% by switching to a generic, which can be used with the same results. Changes to this series of processes means the knee surgery now costs the hospital an average of $8,700 to perform, an 18% savings. The more Gundersen wrings from its costs, the more profit it earns.

It turns out that on knee-replacement surgery, higher-cost U.S. hospitals spent almost twice the amount lower-cost hospitals spent, despite similar quality and comparable patients.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What tools in Chapter 10 were likely used in this study?
  2. What might be the hospital’s next step to improve operational efficiency?

OM in the News (and Video Tip): Formula 1 Pit Stops and the Gilbreths

pitstopFrank and Lillian Gilbreth, the pioneers of time and motion studies, would smile with approval as they watch this 2-minute video comparing F1 racing pit stops in 1950 and today. If you follow F1 racing, it comes as no surprise that pit stops have been reduced to an amazing 2 seconds!

The role of the pit has changed dramatically over the years, writes OR/MS Today (Oct., 2014). For much of racing history, cars would only stop in the event of problems. Scheduled tire changes or fuel stops were not part of the equation. But in 1982, an analytically-minded UK race team focused on 2 important facts. First, softer tires stuck to the track better than harder ones, though they wore out more quickly. Second, less gas in the tank translated into a lighter, faster car. Calculations showed that time spent changing tires and refueling was more than offset by performance on the track.

The idea quickly caught on, making pit stops–and their efficient execution–an integral part of racing. But in 2010, when F1 racing instituted a no refueling policy (out of safety concerns), the stage was set for lightening-fast tire changes. Achieving a 2-second tire change required optimizing the entire process. Analysts looked at everything from the design of wheels nuts (1 per wheel on F1 cars), to special self-positioning pneumatic guns that remove and tighten each nut. They then turned their attention to the pit crews. Teams of 3 work on each wheel, one to remove the old tire, one to position the new one, and one to operate the gun. Their moves are choreographed down to the position of their hands and feet from start to finish. With 2 jack operators and other workers, as many as 20 people crowd around a car during a pit stop–for 2 seconds of work.

What a great example of methods analysis (see Figures 10.5- 10.7) for Chapter 10.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Try to create an activity chart for the pit stop from the video, using Figure 10.6 and Solved Problem 10.1 as models.

2. How does this differ from the NASCAR pit stop described in the Global Company Profile that opens Chapter 10 on pages 396-7?

 

OM in the News: Looking Back–and Forward–on Productivity

productivityFrederick Taylor revolutionized manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century with a simple insight. Most manufacturing work was a sequence of physical motions. You would load coal onto a shovel, carry it to a furnace, throw it into the furnace, walk back to the coal pile and repeat. In a time and motion study, he quantified each step and how long it took. Then he analyzed how to improve the whole process. He noted, for example, that a typical worker could lift 21 pounds for maximum efficiency. Workers varied in size and strength, but on average this weight balanced the number of shovel lifts per minute against the volume per lift. In those early days, workers used the same shovel for all materials, regardless of the density of the stuff being lifted, so less weight was being lifted for the less dense materials. Taylor’s elegant and simple solution — bigger scoops for shovels used to haul the less dense materials — illustrates how careful analysis of a specific work process can increase productivity.

Today, his time and motion studies seem antiquated. Phone calls and memos have replaced shovels and picks for many workers. “Yet despite its association with early factories, a modern version of the spirit of Taylorism is sorely needed,” writes Harvard’s Prof. Sendhil Mullainathan in the New York Times (Sept. 28, 2014). “It’s time to identify and optimize the specific psychologies that constitute the mental alchemy of productivity,” he says.

In one Stanford experiment, some workers were randomly assigned to work at home, others worked in group call centers. The work habits of both groups were carefully monitored electronically, and the workers knew it. Those working at home were 13% more productive than those in call centers. With modern technology, we now have so many ways to quantify, track and motivate productivity, and are just beginning to scratch the surface of doing so.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is productivity such an important issue in OM?

2. Describe how time and motion studies are conducted (see Chapter 10).