Impact of adopting industry 4.0 practices and technologies on time and motion study: A pilot study revealing efficiency gains in a multi-operation workstation

Abstract

This article presents a time and motion study tool, that migratefrom a descriptive approach to one based on data analysis. Itpresents the engineering design, its application, the analysis ofthe results obtained in a pilot study, the results of the validationprocedure and the theoretical framework in operations manage-ment. The tool in question has been proved to be efficient for datacollecting at workstations from video processing. It offers themeans for intensive data collection, as alternative to sampling-based methods. The tool was developed with the aim of facilitatingand speeding up the analysis of approximately 44 hours of videofootage. The effort and processing time were significantly reducedby approximately 6 times, and the new method enabled detailedrecording of each occurrence not foreseen in the process. Thisstudy makes a scientific contribution by proposing a roadmap forthe development of the time and motion study.