Teams of students receive identical product design specifications, a sample unit of the product, and a series of assignment questions that entail time and motion studies, which they must both understand and perform before class discussion. In class, teams explain how they conducted time studies and sort out differences in procedures. They then make business decisions like hiring and staffing in light of remaining differences in time standards across teams. The class also includes an experiment in which student volunteers actually produce the product to assess the effect of division of labor and brainstorm concrete cost reduction ideas, principally those based on methods improvement.
Keywords: Resource Allocation; Product Development;
Citation:
"Work Methods Design Exercise." Harvard Business School Exercise 694-026, August 1993. (Revised August 2002.) View Details