Publicação
Developing a tool for indirect-workforce planning under variable demand in an electrical material company
| Resumo: | Given the competitiveness of today’s industry, companies must carefully plan their resources to maintain an advantage. Among these resources are the indirect workers, which are often overlooked for not adding value to an organization’s products directly, but whose importance should not be neglected. This project was developed in Gewiss Portugal, with the objective of developing tools that aided decision-making when it comes to the planning of production supervisors’ and quality controllers’ tasks. To achieve this, determining the fundamental criteria that drive the need for supervisors was proposed, together with the durations of the main quality assessing tasks. The methodology utilized was action research where, on an initial stage, the process of quality control was deeply studied, from the supply logistics to the several tests performed. After conducting a time study, the duration of these tasks was inputted into a tool developed in Excel, which automatically calculates the daily occupation of the quality controllers, according to different production levels. For the second stage, the activities of the production supervisors were studied to comprehend how much they occupied, according to the characteristics of each work centre, which involved analyses such as work sampling, shadowing, and analytic hierarchy process. The tool developed on this stage allows the user to distribute the work centres through the supervisors and verify how balanced the allocation is, together with their occupation rates. The usage of the tools developed provides the company with an objective method of guaranteeing that the indirect workers mentioned above have the capacity to perform their tasks correctly. By using the supervisors’ tool, a new supervisory allocation through the work centres was proposed, that reduced the mean absolute deviation of the distribution from 12% to 3%. On the other hand, by ensuring that no more indirect workers than necessary are used, the quality tool alone can generate up to 15.000€ yearly in scenarios where production decreases. Overall, the study reached its main objectives and contributed to the existing literature, mainly by providing an in-depth approach to the planning of supervisors that goes beyond their span of control. |
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| Autores principais: | Teixeira, Diogo Francisco Ribeiro |
| Assunto: | Indirect workforce Production supervisors Time studies Workforce planning Estudo de tempos Mão-de-obra indireta Planeamento de mão-de-obra Planeamento de supervisores |
| Ano: | 2025 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | Given the competitiveness of today’s industry, companies must carefully plan their resources to maintain an advantage. Among these resources are the indirect workers, which are often overlooked for not adding value to an organization’s products directly, but whose importance should not be neglected. This project was developed in Gewiss Portugal, with the objective of developing tools that aided decision-making when it comes to the planning of production supervisors’ and quality controllers’ tasks. To achieve this, determining the fundamental criteria that drive the need for supervisors was proposed, together with the durations of the main quality assessing tasks. The methodology utilized was action research where, on an initial stage, the process of quality control was deeply studied, from the supply logistics to the several tests performed. After conducting a time study, the duration of these tasks was inputted into a tool developed in Excel, which automatically calculates the daily occupation of the quality controllers, according to different production levels. For the second stage, the activities of the production supervisors were studied to comprehend how much they occupied, according to the characteristics of each work centre, which involved analyses such as work sampling, shadowing, and analytic hierarchy process. The tool developed on this stage allows the user to distribute the work centres through the supervisors and verify how balanced the allocation is, together with their occupation rates. The usage of the tools developed provides the company with an objective method of guaranteeing that the indirect workers mentioned above have the capacity to perform their tasks correctly. By using the supervisors’ tool, a new supervisory allocation through the work centres was proposed, that reduced the mean absolute deviation of the distribution from 12% to 3%. On the other hand, by ensuring that no more indirect workers than necessary are used, the quality tool alone can generate up to 15.000€ yearly in scenarios where production decreases. Overall, the study reached its main objectives and contributed to the existing literature, mainly by providing an in-depth approach to the planning of supervisors that goes beyond their span of control. |
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