Workstation Design in an Ethiopian Small Scale Leather Garment Industry

Abstract

There are many survey based researches in the recent literature to investigate the critical factors that affect the development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). No study, however, dealt about workstation design which integrates the most important resources of SMEs, i.e., labor and machineries. The aim of this research is to fill this gap by a different and practical approach. One of the labor intensive industries, leather garment sector was selected for the study. Moreover, Genuine Leather Crafts (GLC), a small scale industry, is taken as the case. The analyses revealed that GLC's labor and machine productivity have been very low associated with poor workstations design. A new method is proposed to improve the resource utilization of GLC in particular and SMEs in general. Business development agencies should also give especial attention to the internal factors where the strength of SMEs made up of.