Workload balancing

Ifthe process requires more than one person to maintain takt time, you can apply workload balancing to create an even distribution of work across the resources so that none are overburdened or underutilized. For more information about workload balancing, see The Toyota Way Fieldbook, by J. Liker and D. Meier, New York McGraw-Hill, 2005. 

Time constraints, expenses, and staffing do not play a predominant role in the current state of the AHEAD system. Nevertheless, they have to be considered in process management. Widespread project management systems like Microsoft Project offer functions like the computation of a critical path in an activity network, workload balancing for the staff or calculation of the aggregated expenses for (parts of) a project. Besides these available functions, project management systems offer additional views on the current project state, like the activity oriented Gantt-chart or diverse resource-oriented views. 

There are several planning functions precede the actual retrieval of products for customer orders. The first of these is to check current inventory levels in the forward pick areas and generate replenishment reports. Most warehouse operators prefer to replenish at the beginning of the shift, for reasons of safety and efficiency. Some replenishments may occur during the pick process, especially if the information about orders is incomplete, or if operators select full cartons from the item pick area when they should be selected from the carton pick area. The WMS should support workload balancing in the pick operation reflect different picker capabilities according to data in the personnel master (Table 10), and reflect different number of operators according to pick wave and shift. The abdity to balance workload over more than one day is desirable, but it is usually not available in the typical WMS. 

Capacity requirement planning (CRP) It is a computerized technique to predict resource requirements of all available workstations (also see RCCP). RCCP balances workloads at a high level, CRP will then fine tune the workload balance. 

Most oil companies offer a planned lubrication maintenance (PLM) service that will meet these requirements with the minimum of effort on the part of the customer. These schemes provide logical routing for the lubrication operative, balanced workloads and clear instructions to those responsible for specific tasks associated with lubrication and fault-reporting facilities. Many schemes are now designed for computer operation, which also accommodate plant and grade changes, operation costs and manpower planning. It is essential that any such scheme should be adaptable to individual requirements. 

Time management is essential for the students, who had to balance their time commitment to the project and the workloads from the other courses. They were also required to take an additional six credits course in the school level, high tech entrepreneurship program (HTEP) for both Fall and Spring semesters. Each semester, the students were asked to monitor their activities for one week period, rank the activities in term of priority and calculate the amount of time used. The students were then asked to reassess their time usage and create an action plan. 

Another supportive role that management must accept is the provision for additional resources when QAU responsibilities are increased either by management, by revised or new regulations, or by increased study workloads. Such resources include personnel, office space, equipment, clerical support, etc. Management must continually review and balance the allocation of resources to the quality assurance and scientific study areas to efficiently operate with the desired level of quality. 

Resource management it starts transactions, regulates their accesses to shared resources, monitors their execution, and balances their workloads. 

Once work standards have been established, they can serve as one element in an employee-performance-evaluation scheme. An advantage of computer technology is the ability to have instantaneous information on individual employee performance in terms of the rate of output. This serves as one objective measure of how hard employees are working. But managers have to understand that this is just one element of employee performance and emphasis on quantity can have an adverse effect on the quality of work. Therefore, a balanced performance-evaluation system will include quality considerations as well. These are not as easy to obtain and are not as instantaneously available as are quantity measures. However, managers must resist the temptation to emphasize quantity measures just because they are readily available. A key consideration in any employee evaluation program is the issue of fairness, just as in workload determination. 

See Graham (1969). This implies that at aU times this heuristic performs reasonably well. The LPT heuristic has been used in industrial scheduling systems in order to provide a reasonable balance of the workload over the different machines. After the partition has been determined by the LPT rule, the jobs assigned to any given machine can be resequenced. Resequendng a machine clearly does not affect the bedance and may be done to minimize a secondary objective. 

Every job has some form of performance expectation. While a performance expectation or performance goal can be motivating for an employee, and clearly has advantages for the organization, initially the performance expectations need to be balanced against the increase in safety risk which may be associated with them. Performance expectations create work pressure, for example to achieve a specified degree of output in a certain time. Thus, performance expectations are closely related to workload, although the relationship is not exclusive. 

At first sight, the two approaches appear to have the same focus, the exarrrirration of the balance between work demands and the available resources of the employee. The two areas differ, however, irt their scope. In stress theories, demands and resources are conceptualized more broadly than in workload theories. Research on workload focuses on the capacity to process information in the task, and demands refer to the specific requirements of the task. In stress theories, demands refer not only to the task, but to the entire work environmerrt, including its social and organizatiortal aspects resources refer not only to processing capacity, but also to personality traits, coping strategies, and social... 

In all three conditions the examiners performed the same memory search tasks between 4 15 p.m. and 5 45 p.m., immediately after the end of the working day. The order of the three conditions was balanced over the 30 participants according to a Latin square design. At least 1 week separated the conditions. Urinary excretion rates of catecholamines, adrenaline, and noradrenaline were measured at the start and end of the memory search tasks session. In addition, several performance measures were taken in order to study the changes in mental efficiency under the various levels of workload. What is of interest now are the urinary excretion rates of both catecholamines measured at the end of the memory search task session, broken down to order (first time smdied, second time studied, and third time studied) and to work load condition (light, normal, and intensified). 

Silent Deviations is a term used by several companies in the oil and gas industry to describe the mismatch between procedures and actual work practices (Tinmannsvik 2008). It points to a constant conflict between getting the job done and compliance with procedures and is an expression of how routine violations of written procedures tacitly become accepted practice. Reason (1997) uses the term necessary violations , where operators find a balance between procedures and knowledge based problem solving in order to minimize workload. 

The biggest impact on the supply of parts on time was clearly the way the incoming unserviceable turbines were treated. Previously, these units were fed into the process to balance the workload of the whole operation. This meant that turbines could wait several days in the fully assembled state before being disassembled. Although this workload buffer was effective in managing capacity, it caused a major delay in the supply chain dynamics. 

---