Job Methods – An Approach to Increase Human Resource Productivity in Pandemic COVID-19 (A Case Study of Parason Group, India)

Abstract

Apart from multidimensional challenges and fierce competition, COVID-19 has created immense stress on manufacturing industries to work with limited human resources due to social distancing and other safety measures. During this tough time (COVID-19) companies are in great pressure to manage their costs, one of the significant cost is labour cost. Labour productivity is a division of worth of goods or services produced and labour hours used to produce that, thus productivity improvement can be done by producing more with same labour hours or producing same with less labour hours. There is a process of producing goods or services, each process may have one or more activity and each activity will have some methods to accomplish. Each process is also having its completion time which ultimately depends on number of activities and methods. If somehow the number of activities can be reduced or methods to accomplish the activity can be simplified in terms of easiness and less time without impacting quality of products or services, the completion time of that process will be reduced and eventually a gain in productivity will be achieved to help companies to be more productive and profitable without addition of manpower. The facilities and technology enhancement what the manufacturing world is enjoying today, is the result of improvement in production methods, e.g. automobile, mobile phones, laptops, home appliances etc. The TWI - Job Methods program is a structured program to identify and eliminate non value adding activities and to improve the existing methods of doing a job with available resources. Job Methods programme is focused on making the methods of work smarter and better. TWI – Job Methods is the best tool for involving all supervisor and workers in an organization for improvement activities. It also helps to involve the supervisors with the workforce and bring out collaborative solutions for different obstacles that occurs while working. Job Methods programme also provides a systematic improvement proposal to management to communicate so that decision making about new methods or process can be effective and quick. The case study had completed during Jan and Feb 2020 and focused on the practical application of Job Methods (JM) to improve productivity by using same number of human resources in producing refiner plates in a leading paper and pulp machine manufacturing company in India. TWI-JM technique is very relevant during tough time (COVID-19) when manpower availability is a concern and raise in productivity is required. Keywords - Training within industry (TWI), Job Methods (JM), Job Breakdown Sheet (JBS), Inner Diameter (ID), Outer Diameter (OD) DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-16-01 Publication date: June 30th 2020