Account for Personal Fatigue and Delay Factors With Big Data

Posted on: April 14, 2022

Adjusting your labor standards for time lost to personal needs, fatigue and delays just got easier with automation

Labor standards are calculated based on what the average worker can reasonably be expected to accomplish on a consistent basis when trained. The goal is for these standards to be fair and equitable for both employees and management, and be effective over extended periods of time. For these goals to be achieved, it’s important to remember that people aren’t machines; personal needs, fatigue, and unavoidable delays must be accounted for. If you fail to do so you’ll burn out your staff.

Burnt out staff tend to experience performance dips — assuming they don’t quit outright. 

Calculating and accounting for personal fatigue and other delay factors have traditionally been done by industrial engineers. But manual calculations take a great deal of time and aren’t flexible enough for the demands of the modern workforce. 

Traditionally, the calculated labor standard is reduced by roughly 5% to account for:

  • Fatigue 
  • Personal Needs 
    • Bathroom Breaks
    • Lunch
    • Rest Periods
  • Unavoidable Delays 
    • Equipment Malfunction
    • Vanning / Devanning transport problems 

This can fluctuate as high as 10% for more demanding tasks. The traditional method would require the IEs to manually count average bathroom breaks, rest periods, and so on to calculate the standard adjustment. The time it takes to manually calculate personal fatigue and delay factors grows exponentially with each new process.

Automate your personal fatigue and delay factors

Easy Metrics cuts the calculation and adjustment time drastically by applying advanced linear regression models to millions of data points gathered from your facilities. By calculating performance standards from real operational data, the natural employee fatigue by process (and unavoidable delays) are already factored in automatically. This saves your IEs time and effort spent predicting these variables that they can instead put toward the higher value, strategic work of process configuration and standard validation. 

If you’d like to learn more, schedule a demo with one of our operations analytics experts to learn how to streamline your personal fatigue and delay factor calculations.

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