Work-Time Identification and Effort Assessment: Application to Fenestration Industry and Case Study

Abstract

Reliable quantitative description of the manufacturing process is indispensable for supporting the effective management of the company within current industrial reality. Time estimation is an important element of the effort evaluation process which is essential along many phases of business development from bidding for competitive contracts to design and production phases. In particular, the time estimates are useful in the resource planning process, especially when the precision of the provided estimates can be quantitatively characterized. We propose in this work an approach that combines the techniques developed within predetermined time methods (such as MODAPTS and MINIMOST) with the statistical techniques that use the real data (collected along the stop-watch time measurements). Our approach allows to obtain not only time estimates themselves, but also the confidence intervals for them. This information allows the practitioner to decide whether provided time estimates (coupled with accuracy parameters) meet his criteria. The proposed approach can be used fo time estimations in the projects containing several operations of different nature. The application of the proposed methodology is discussed in detail for the case of fenestration industry.