Learn How to Run a Time and Motion Study to Improve Your Business

22nd May 2023

by Craig Willis

If you’re looking to improve your business and ready to make fundamental changes in how you manage it, it’s time to consider running a time and motion study. It will provide you with the information you need to assess your business and find where to improve it, based on that data.

How do you go about this? We’re here to help.

What is a time and motion study?

A time and motion study is an evaluative analysis of industrial performance. In other words, studying how much time goes into conducting certain actions in a business process. Originally conceived for early 20th-century offices and factories in the USA, time and motion studies have since been adopted by a variety of industries.

The goal is to maximise efficiency. Using measurable data when analysing business processes and looking for the improvement spots, helps organisations to standardise their work processes and continuously improve.

A time and motion study consist of five key steps:

1. Study how your business is currently running. Having a full picture of what the day-to-day consists of is key to being able to make decisions. You can’t simply suggest changes without being aware of how things currently are, as you will not understand the impact they may have. You’ll spend a lot of time watching how your team is doing things, how long it is taking them and how far they may be required to travel.

2. Find bottlenecks or trouble spots for improvement. Once you’ve understood how your business runs, you’ll see the bigger picture of your business processes, you’ll be able to study them closely to see what’s working and not working. Anything that might be affecting efficiency will become more obvious.

3. Conducting the necessary changes to improve. Based on the bottlenecks or trouble areas you’ve found, you’ll take steps to try and fix them. Your goal will always be efficiency, so you may be removing redundant steps or finding ways to cut down travel time.

4. Evaluate if the desired results are achieved. If you’re looking to reduce certain wait times, you will pay close attention to whether or not simplifying a sign-off process made a positive impact on wait times or not. Or, if it impacts it only for a short time and then goes back to normal – then you will want to assess why that is happening.

5. Continue to run the study. Based on the results, continue improving to become even more efficient. You will find more and more ways to make the process better and save your team time and effort, either with the adoption of automation or with discovering new sourcing options, for example.

The theory sounds easy. But once you start getting into the weeds, you might feel overwhelmed with understanding how your business works and how exactly to get started.

Fortunately, Liberty Spark exists to help you get going.

How Liberty Spark helps you to create a time and motion study

Liberty Spark is a solution built specifically for process improvement, starting with mapping the visualisation of the actions an organisation takes to arrive at certain business goals. Process mapping is crucial in helping you and your team understand how your organisation conducts all its daily tasks. It is also the key to finding improvement spots.

How does this work for a time and motion study?

A time and motion study is essentially made up of two parts: Data collection and data analysis.

First, data collection. This is studying how your organisation is run: what your employees are doing daily, what tasks need to be accounted for, how long it’s taking, what steps must be taken for processes to move forward, how far people are traveling to complete tasks, etc.

A process map is an instrumental component of truly understanding how your organisation runs: it helps you determine what you are going to measure in the latter part of the study, and it helps you record any deviations from the expected process. A deviation is when the original process was thought up in one way, but over time employees may have changed it for a variety of reasons.

If this is never written down or accounted for, as an organisation leader, you may well be unaware of it. Process mapping workshops that are interactive and collaborative, involving all relevant employees to a process. It’s usually an eye-opening experience to help you discover how your organisation is truly running.

Mapping it all in one singular, collaborative platform such as Spark makes it easier for everyone to keep track of how the process is actually running. And, because of our use of Universal Process Notation (UPN), it is so simple that everyone can follow along, no matter their role in the company.

With your processes mapped, you will begin to note the areas that are causing delays or slowing things down. This leads to the second part of the time and motion study: the data analysis.

The goal here is to take what you’ve learned about how your organisation works and think of ways to improve it. You change parts of a process and set some desired goals, such as gaining back time.

Then, you let these changes run for a while and keep track of whether or not they achieve the desired results.

If sourcing from a different location is as much of a time and movement consumption as your original choice, then you haven’t gained much. On the other hand, it may be a game-changer. These types of changes take time to truly materialise, so you will be evaluating how they change over a significant time period.

Conducting this part of the time and motion study in the traditional manner will significantly slow you down. You will have to convince stakeholders the changes are necessary, then wait on shareholder sign-off to make the changes, then wait for the changes to take effect and then may have to return to shareholders if they do not make the impact you were aiming for.

Is there a way to make this happen faster?

Conducting this part of the time and motion study in the traditional manner will significantly slow you down. You will have to convince stakeholders the changes are necessary, then wait on shareholder sign-off to make the changes, then wait for the changes to take effect and then may have to return to shareholders if they do not make the impact you were aiming for.

Quantify takes the maps and data added into your company’s folders and runs an analysis that it presents to you in a dashboard. The tool points out improvement spots based on this data, helping you make sense of all the places where you can become more efficient.

Once the problems are located, Quantify can help you explore different scenarios by making changes to the process. You can add or remove certain steps and see how the process will change – all of it based on your available capacity.

Not only will you be able to map out potential changes, but also see the impact a change may have on the process over time. From a month to a year, it may be quite different, and Quantify helps you see it.

You won’t need to physically make any changes just yet. You can simply discover what the best solution may be to improve your time and travel over workshops with your team. No longer will you be crossing your fingers and relying on seeing results over time. An image of what your changes may affect will be available. No need for guesswork.

Spark’s Quantify takes it a step further and helps you create a business case of how these changes will affect your time and movements. You don’t have to go through the effort of building a case for your shareholders from scratch based on assumptions and predictions. Quantify pulls the data and calculations together in a digestible, easily understood format for your stakeholders to understand. Your sign-off times will significantly decrease when it’s time to actually make the change, as the future effects will be easily understood.

Time and motion study for practical progress

A time and motion study helps you to spot troublesome steps or bottlenecks in your organisation processes. Pointing out what’s slowing you down and damaging your efficiency.

In the age of cloud-based, collaborative platforms, running a time and motion study in the traditional way is detrimental, as your competitors will not be doing the same.

Spark and Quantify can help you run your time and motion studies quickly and efficiently so your business can constantly reap the improvements.

Ready to run one yourself?