22nd May 2023
If you’re looking to improve your business and are ready to make fundamental changes in how you manage it, it’s time to consider running a time and motion study. This technique helps identify inefficiencies, streamline workflows and improve overall performance. It will provide you with the information you need to assess your business and find where to improve it, based on that data.
But how exactly do you conduct a time and motion study? We’re here to help.
A time and motion study is an evaluative analysis of industrial performance. In other words, it is used to study 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 primary goal of a time and motion study is to maximise efficiency. By using measurable data when analysing business processes and looking for improvement spots, organisations can standardise their work processes and continuously improve.
Conducting a time and motion study can help businesses in several ways:
Step 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.
Some work-related questions that can help businesses identify where time is spent:
Step 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, and 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.
Step 3: Conducting the necessary changes to improve
Based on the bottlenecks or trouble areas you’ve found, you’ll take steps to try to fix them. Your goal will always be efficiency, so you may remove redundant steps or find ways to cut down travel time.
Step 4: Evaluate if the desired results are achieved
If you’re looking to reduce certain wait times, you will pay close attention to whether simplifying a sign-off process has a positive impact on wait times. If it only impacts wait times for a short time and then goes back to normal, then you will want to assess why that is happening.
Step 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
To implement a successful time and motion study, here are some best practices to follow:
The theory sounds easy. But once you start exploring it, you might feel overwhelmed by the complexity of understanding how your business works and how exactly to get started.
Fortunately, Liberty Spark helps to get you going.
Liberty Spark is a process mapping solution built specifically for process improvement. It starts 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.
A time and motion study is essentially made up of two key phases: data collection and data analysis. If either of these isn’t done properly, it can cause issues that undermine the entire study.
The data collection phase is all about understanding how your organisation operates on a day-to-day basis. This involves closely observing and assessing a number of factors, such as:
One of the most important tools in this phase is the process map. It helps you visualise how your organisation truly runs and lays the groundwork for what you’ll need to measure in the analysis phase. It also helps you spot deviations, those moments where a process has evolved over time in practice, even if it’s different from how it was originally intended.
Often, these changes happen gradually and without documentation, meaning leadership may not even be aware they’re occurring. That’s why collaborative process mapping workshops are so valuable: they bring together everyone involved in a process, creating an opportunity to share insights and get a real understanding of how things are actually done. It’s often an eye-opening experience.
Mapping everything in one collaborative platform, like Spark, makes it easier for everyone to stay aligned. And thanks to our use of Universal Process Notation (UPN), the processes are presented in a simple, intuitive way that’s easy for anyone to follow, regardless of their role.
Once your processes are clearly mapped out, it becomes much easier to identify bottlenecks and areas that are slowing things down.
Once you’ve gathered all the relevant information about your processes, it’s time to move into the second phase of the time and motion study: data analysis.
This part is all about using what you’ve learned to find opportunities for improvement. You start by looking at where time is being lost or where processes could be more efficient. From there, you make targeted changes and set clear goals, for example, reducing the time it takes to complete a task or streamlining a handover between teams.
Data analysis turns insights into action. It’s where you move from simply understanding how things work to actually improving how they work.
Liberty Spark takes the process maps and data stored in your company’s folders and runs a smart analysis, delivering the results straight to your dashboard. It highlights areas for improvement based on real data, helping you spot exactly where your organisation could be running more efficiently.
Not only can you map out potential changes, but you can also see how those changes might play out over time. Whether you’re looking at the impact over a month or a full year, Liberty Spark gives you a clear picture of what to expect.
There’s no need to make any changes right away. You can explore different solutions and test their potential in workshops with your team, all without touching your current setup. No more guesswork, and no more hoping for the best: just a visual, data-backed view of how your improvements could take shape.
Liberty Spark helps you run your time and motion studies quickly, efficiently, and with confidence, so your business can keep evolving for the better.
Ready to run a time and motion study? Get in touch with us today.
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