Everyday each one of us assesses work loads and work paces in one form or another.

For example, each time you join a queue to be served, you will make a decision.

You observe the pace or the speed of the person serving; you look at the length of the queue and make a decision whether or not to stay in the queue.

When considering the person serving, perhaps comments like ' going at that speed, it won't be long before it's my turn' or 'they are doing a good job, I just wish they would get on with it' or 'at this rate it will be ages, I'm off'.

Just like your clients, they will look at the equivalent of your serving speed and the length of your business queue and decide whether or not to stay with you or take their business elsewhere.

In today's market everyone has to pull their own 'weight' and it is this 'weight' that has to be recognised and quantified to achieve an acceptable return on payroll.

You cannot rely on lean alone to achieve your best practice goal, for no matter what method is used, an activity must always be delivered as part of a competitive workload.

Skills and techniques are required to recognise and quantify competitive work loads. Management and key productivity drivers require training, that's where I come in.

For some considerable time, I have assisted many clients in Sweden, Belgium, France, UK, Germany, Austria, Spain, Poland, and Russia, conducting 'Work Load and Pace' audits to global best practice benchmarks and ILO 100 training.

Without fail these audit results have provided potential opportunities of cost reduction and savings, where for example, clients had under loaded their work stations, which resulted in excessive headcount due to work load calculations being based on inaccurate work pace benchmarks, not being aligned to global best practice.

'Work Load and Pace' operates in tandem with lean and one of the most important phases of DMAIC is 'measure' the need to know 'where you are' in order to get 'where you should be'.

Sometimes a reality check from an outside party may be required to confirm exactly where you are and not where you think you are.

Work Load and Pace audits are normally a three day event per site, including results presentation and can be accompanied by Engineers, Staff or Union Officials.

 "Sometimes knowing the truth is not pleasant, but it is always profitable"

Here is an example of the results of a typical Work Load & Pace Audit, could be of a line ,section, department or complete site.

 

The cost of this bespoke Workload & Pace Audit is subject to a formal quotation based on venue location and audit sample size, please email : Harvey Folkard on prodconsult@talktalk.net